Rate schedules

A rate schedule is what you expect one payer to pay. Put it in once and charges price themselves, instead of somebody typing a number from memory on every job.

Each schedule belongs to one payer and one of your billing companies, and covers a date range. Find them under Rate schedules.

Where the prices come from

You. They are your numbers, not a figure WinchWorks supplies.

Sometimes there is a signed rate agreement with that carrier, and you work down it line by line. Often there is not — you know what that payer has historically paid for a passenger tow, and that is what you enter.

Both are valid. A rate schedule is not a contract, and nothing in WinchWorks treats it as one. It is your record of what you expect to be paid, so that pricing a job stops depending on who is at the desk that day.

Rates vary shop by shop and region by region, so there is no national figure anyone could fill in for you. If WinchWorks pre-filled a number under a real carrier's name, it would be a guess wearing their brand.

What a line holds

Each line is one service:

• The service — tow, mileage, daily storage, winching, and so on
• The vehicle class it applies to, or blank for every class
• The price
• Coverage — see below
• A cap, in days or dollars
• Tax treatment, if this line differs from your default

The most specific line wins. If you have a storage line for Passenger and a general storage line with no class, a passenger job uses the Passenger line.

You cannot have two lines for the same service and class in one schedule. WinchWorks rejects the duplicate rather than guessing which you meant.

Coverage: will this payer pay for it?

Coverage describes what you expect the payer to do:

• Covered — they pay for it
• Not covered — they do not pay for it
• Prior auth — a reminder to check with them first

None of these stop you billing. WinchWorks warns and prices the charge anyway. That is deliberate: what a payer covers and what the job actually cost are two different things, and you should be free to bill for work you did.

If an insurer will not pay a line, the money is usually collected from whoever comes to pick the vehicle up. See Payments, short-pays and write-offs.

Caps: what they normally pay

A cap records what a payer normally pays — thirty days of storage, or three hundred dollars of scene cleanup.

Caps are information, not a limit. WinchWorks bills the full amount and tells you when a job goes past the cap, so you know the difference is likely to be argued or collected from someone else. It does not quietly reduce your invoice.

Missing rates are not coverage problems

Two different things get confused, so it is worth being exact:

A charge with no matching rate line is priced by hand and flagged so you can see it was not priced from a schedule. Nothing is blocked. You do not have to finish every schedule before the software is useful.

The Rates page shows which services and classes each schedule is missing. Work through it when you have a quiet afternoon, or fix each gap the first time it costs you a manual price.

Changing rates

Issued invoices never change, and neither does the pricing history behind them.

When you edit an active schedule, WinchWorks keeps the old version and starts a new one. Anything already invoiced stays priced the way it was.

When rates change on a known date — new pricing starting in January — set that date when you save. WinchWorks creates the new version as a draft starting then, and closes the current version the day before. Nothing changes until the date arrives. Effective dates must be in the future.

Schedule status

• Draft — not in use yet. Prices nothing.
• Active — used for pricing during its date range.
• Archived — kept for the record.

A job prices against whichever active schedule covers its date.