BILLING/PAYROLL RATE CONVERSIONS TO A KILOBYTE
The kilobyte (or "K" for short) is the standard billing unit advocated by ASMART. It consists of 1024 characters or bytes and is the standard unit of measurement in the computer world. The number of bytes or characters are derived from the size of the transcribed ASCII report file (as reported by your computer).
These examples use the most commonly interpreted definitions for gross and character lines. For all examples that use the word "character", a "character" is defined as a character that is printed on a page and includes spaces and carriage returns. This is also known as a "visual" character: if the character does not appear on a printed page, it is not counted. No extra characters are included or allowed for creating formatting.
TO CONVERT FROM A GROSS LINE TO A KILOBYTE
First, convert to a 65 character line:
On average, a hospital report typed in 12 point courier with 1" margins contains about 45 characters per line. To find the conversion factor to convert a gross line to a 65 character line, divide 65 by 45 to get a ratio of 1.44.
[gross line] x 1.44 = [65 character line]
Example: convert 12 cents a gross line to a 65 character line.
12 x 1.44 = 17.28 cents a 65 character line.
A unit of 1024 characters is about 15.75 times larger than a unit of 65 characters. So, to find the rate per kilobyte, multiply the rate per 65 character line by 15.75.
Example:
17.28 x 15.75 = 272.16 cents or $2.7216 per kilobyte
TO CONVERT FROM A CHARACTER LINE TO A KILOBYTE
First, figure out the cost per character. To do this divide the total cost per line by the number of characters in the line.
[total cost per line] / [characters per line] = cost per character
Then multiply the cost per character by 1024.
Example: convert 9 cents a 100 character line to a price per kilobyte (1024 characters).
.09 x 1024 = 92.16 cents per 1024 characters or $0.9216 per kilobyte.