What is the ASMART recommended billing (or payroll) method?

ASMART's recommended billing method is billing by the number of kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes or characters) in an ASCII/ANSI* text file. However, the following must be true:

1. The transcribed text must be formatted within the formatting that is allowed for ASCII text files.
2. The final transcribed document must be saved as an ASCII text file without line breaks.
3. If the document is printed for delivery to the client, the printout must take place from the ASCII text file.

The reasons for the steps above are to avoid a situation where transcription is done in a word processing file, complete with word processing only formatting (such as indents, bolds, underlines, etc.), and then saved as an ASCII text file for billing purposes only. If one where to do this, if would defeat the one to one correlation between the number of characters typed in an ASCII text file and the number of bytes the computer says are in the file.

Billing by this method offers the following advantages:

1. You get a one to one correlation between the number of characters typed in a report and the number of bytes that are in the file.
2. You do not need any special line counting software to do billing counts. This makes it easy for both clients and transcriptionists to independently verify their billing/payroll counts.
3. Transcriptionists have to type less to transcribe a report (because of reduced formatting).

A one to one correlation between visual characters and bytes

There is a one to one correlation between the number of visual characters plus spaces that appear on the screen or a printout of an ASCII text file and the number of bytes that the computer reports.

There is one exception, however, pressing the enter key (which generates a carriage return) creates two characters or bytes on a PC: a carriage return character followed by a line feed character. Therefore, every carriage return in a text file contains 2 characters or bytes. Since there are not very many carriage returns in a text file compared to the rest of the text, this is not a big issue for billing.

Independently verifiable billing/payroll counts

One of the best things about billing by the number of kilobytes in an ASCII text file is the fact that anyone, anywhere, can verify that the counts you came up with match theirs. Both your clients and your transcriptionists can now independently verify that are being billed or paid correctly and honestly.

For more information on ASCII text files, please refer to:

Everything you ever wanted to know about ASCII text files
Formatting and printing issues with ASCII text files

[Return to main page]

*Note that wherever ASCII text is used, it also refers to ANSI (windows) text files also.