If I could show you how to add more money to your business by eliminating a line item in your invoice would you be interested. Equipment monitoring, set up and take down is what I am referring to.

Over the years I have resisted every attempt of the insurance companies to get me to charge for equipment monitoring. For years I have got anywhere from $125.00 to $145.00 a day for a Phoenix 200 Max and Phoenix 200 HT. (The difference in the price is the different vendor programs that we are affiliated with and what they allow us to charge.) Most of the time I am also able to get a $13.00 per dehumidifier per job charge for changing the filters in the dehumidifiers after the job is finished. I do not charge for equipment set up and take down or monitoring. That has always been included in the price of the dehumidifier and fan rentals.

Recently though one of our vendor programs changed their price book and said that we can now only charge $66.75 per day for our dehumidifiers but we can add equipment set up and take down and monitoring of $50.00 per day. Who ever came up with this never ran a restoration company. Say I have 4 dehumidifiers on a job charging the old way. That would be $125.00 x 4 = $500.00 per day. The new way would be $66.75 x 4 +$50.00 = $317.00 per day. So now I am losing $183.00 per day on this job.

While I was working on getting this changed it came to my attention that these numbers were taken from a national average of water restoration companies. So my question to all restoration companies would be why would you want to charge for the equipment setup and take down in a separate line item if it is going to cost you money? Look over your billings and see if you are losing money by charging this item out as a separate line item vs. the money you could be bringing in by charging appropriately for your dehumidifiers.