On this page, you can view actual scans from transcription
service vendor quotes. What you will discover is that these
vendors are manipulating line definitions to create deceptively
low transcription rates. Note that all actual vendor names and
references have been removed from these quotes (to protect the
innocent--or guilty?).
What does this mean for you if you sell your transcription
services to others? It means that you have to compete against
unethical billing practices. Is this fair? You decide.
This vendor was asked to provide billing charges as gross
lines, 55 character lines, by the ASCII text kilobyte, and by the
method they most commonly use. As you can see, this vendor
charges $.1325 per gross line. They charge $.1350 per 55
character line. Using line rate
conversion factors you should realize that this rate should
be closer to 16 cents per 55 character line. This vendor did not
quote a price per kilobyte, but their most commonly used
definition is based on the AAMT character line, which they charge
$.1395 for. Again if you apply a conversion factor here, this
should really be closer to 19 cents per AAMT line.
The client who sent in this RFP also asked that they be provided
the actual costs of transcribing some enclosed sample reports.
For some reason, this vendor is quoting a different price to
transcribe the same report depending on the billing method used.
This almost seems to imply that there is some intrinsic overhead
to billing by, for instance, a 55 character line, verses a gross
line which is obviously ridiculous.
This second vendor shows the same deception with billing line
counts. As you can see, this vendor charges $.145 for a gross
line. They did not state a rate for a 55 character line, but did
state a rate of $4.61 for an ASCII kilobyte. If you do some
calculations here, this equates to about 29 cents a 65 character
line which would imply either a mistake or a misunderstanding
about what a kilobyte is.
Lastly, they charge .125 per AAMT line. This should be a red
flag. A 65 character line, be it AAMT or not, should always be
more per line than a gross line. But in this case, it is
substantially less, which would lead one to believe that this
vendor is manipulating the AAMT line definition to get a
deceptively low line rate.
And again, for some reason this vendor is quoting different
prices to transcribe the same report depending on the billing
method.
As you can see, this does not paint a rosy picture for our
industry.