It cannot catch a short-pay. Not because you are careless — because it has nothing to compare.
The MinuteMen check arrives. One check, four claimants, one stub. You billed $73.71 for Renata Salcido’s week; the line pays $57.57. Sixteen dollars and fourteen cents, gone quietly.
To catch that in a workbook you need three things sitting next to each other: what that specific form billed, what was applied to that specific form, and a comparison that runs every time. Your Bill Tracker has a billed column and a paid column, so in principle it can. In practice the check covers four people across two weeks, the amounts get entered as a total, and the per-form comparison is the thing that gets skipped at 11 p.m. because the totals nearly match.
And short-pays are not one big theft. They are forty small ones. Each individual gap is too small to interrupt your evening for, and the sum of them is not. Which is exactly why they survive.
Why bills come back short
- Unit math
- You billed 0.1 units; bill review priced it as one hour, or as nothing.
- A stale fee schedule
- Ohio’s voc-rehab rates change every October. A payer on last year’s table underpays every line by the difference.
- Overflow forms
- Your week ran past six lines onto a B form. The payer paid the A form and treated the B as a duplicate.
- A dropped line
- One line disappears in bill review and the remainder still looks roughly right on the check.
