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Our
Unique Approach | Time
& Billing | Emergency Services |
Guarantees |
Service
Area
Aquarium Professionals Group invoices on a service-by-service
basis. Our clients are billed for labor time, materials, livestock, and a
travel charge (if applicable). Time is calculated in 15-minute increments
with a minimum of one hour per service. Our material and livestock prices
are comparable to what you would pay in any reputable retail store.
Invoices are itemized so you know exactly what you are paying for. Our
technicians take extremely detailed notes during the service, and all paperwork
is carefully reviewed to make sure you are not charged for items or livestock
you did not receive.
We have gone to great lengths to ensure accuracy in our billing,
and we want to be as fair as possible. We have built-in safeguards to make sure you do not pay for the time it takes our staff to correct their mistakes when they are cleaning or installing your aquarium. We calculate our billed time as follows:
When your aquarium technician arrives at your home or office, they phone into our office either using your phone, if it is available, or their cellular phone. Our main office phone lines are routed through a
computer program that logs the time of the call
and Caller ID if available. This allows us to record the time and place of the call even if no one is in the office. The time of this phone call is the "TIME IN" at your aquarium service. This is the time we begin billing you for our services.
After they have packed up their equipment and are ready to leave your home or office, your aquarium technician calls in again. The time of this phone call is the "TIME OUT" at your aquarium service. This is the time we stop billing you for our services.
Billed time is calculated to the nearest 15 minutes.
We maintain a database for each of our clients that shows the average time that it takes to service a client’s aquarium, and we compare the billable time it took to service the aquarium with the average time it has taken to do this task in the past.
If there is a discrepancy between the actual and average times, indicating the job took longer than usual, we then look at the notes and comments that the technician recorded on the service sheet to see what problems or circumstances, if any, accounted for the increased time.
If the increase in time was due to something we did (For example: spilling water and cleaning it up), we subtract the extra time from the billable time. If the increase in time was due to some factor we had no control over or due to a mistake made by a client (For example: over-feeding, medicating an aquarium, slow water pressure or drains, installing a new filter, or over-stocking the tank with fish), we add the additional time to the billable time.
Occasionally, your aquarium technician will have a technician-in-training accompany them as part of our on-the-job training program. You do not pay for a trainee’s time. However, if your aquarium is too large for one person to clean in a reasonable amount of time, we will send another technician to assist in the work and we do bill for their time.
Back to Maintenance Menu
Our
Unique Approach | Time
& Billing | Emergency Services |
Guarantees |
Service
Area
|
