Are You Capitalizing on Every Extra Billing Opportunity?

Here are the eight most common reasons why you miss them

June 23, 2022

Content sponsored by: Vizzn

Nothing will have a greater impact on your profitability than capitalizing on every extra billing opportunity. Every dollar billed goes straight to the bottom line and every dollar missed is a dollar lost forever.

Some contractors hesitate to bill extras for fear of damaging customer relationships. This is proving to be an unfounded concern. Evidence has shown that valid extra billings improve customer relationships, not diminish them. It highlights the contractor’s resilience and talent, and it says, “you got the job done despite many obstacles”. Extra billings may be the customer’s only awareness of such challenges; they may even thank you for going the extra mile!

The 8 most common reasons that contractors miss-out on extra billings:

They fail to identify differences between the approved for construction drawings and the tendered drawings. Differences between those two drawings can be a gold mine of extra billings.
They fail to identify scope creep, like being asked to perform the work to more strict specifications or in a more costly manner. Such changes can be an extra billing treasure-trove.
They fail to identify changes from the planned construction sequence, such as not being allowed to start in the ideal spot or being required to perform it piecemeal. Differences in site staging, actual versus expected, can be an extra billing cash cow.
Field personnel that unwittingly and regularly give small undocumented favors to the related engineers and developers. Do yourself the favor next time and bill them instead. You will build up far more goodwill taking them out for lunch or a hockey game, and at a fraction of the cost.
100% of all extra billings opportunities that your billing team was not made aware of, will get missed! A lack of visibility will translate into a lack of money in the bank.
Extra billings that are poorly documented will get rejected by the owner. Strong documentation is the equivalent of a treasure map, without it there is no treasure to be had.
Extra billings are submitted too late and thus not considered for payment. When it comes to getting extra billings paid, time is money.
The contractor does not use best-in-class software to ensure items 1-7 never happen. Without best-in-class software to help contractors consistently identify and document additional billings, a contractor will never reach that 10% best-in-class edge.

Vizzn is the world’s leading software solution for the heavy civil construction industry that optimizes the identification and collection of extra billings. It does this through interactive site maps that are viewable on the phone by every team member on the site. Those same interactive drawings show the exact location of the viewer on the screen and detail how the surrounding scope was bid, including key methodologies and sequencing. Team members can then identify differences as extra billing opportunities and attach photos, videos, and signed documents to those scopes. These identified points, complete with endless documentation, will show up in the correct place on the shared drawings; these are the same drawings being relied upon by the office team for billing preparation purposes.

As a best practice, Vizzn enabled companies empower everyone on their team to document anything that could be potential extra billing. Everyone can add notes and orientated photos and videos to their findings. These finding are automatically filtered and placed on the shared drawings for the billing team to easily view and assess each point for legitimacy. If it turns out not to be a billing opportunity, it may still be valuable for quality control at a later date. Simply reclassify it under Vizzn’s Quality Control documentation.

All other extra billing opportunities can also be documented in the same way and by anyone on the team. As a good best practice, Vizzn enabled companies should advise everyone on their team, if in doubt, to document it as an extra. As Vizzn filters these points by placing them onto the drawings for extremely quick reference and later analysis, having extra points is not a burden. If it is not legit billing, it can simply be recategorized as a quality control point and it may become valuable for your project management at a later date. With Vizzn, there is no such thing as too much documentation.

Vizzn photos are geo-stamped, date-stamped, and even show camera orientation. These photos, along with all relevant documentation, are automatically placed on the electronic drawings as an extra billing point. This process makes all your extra billings both easy to create and ironclad.