A bill the payer paid — for less than you billed, without denying it. The most expensive kind of underpayment, because nothing about it announces itself.
A short-pay is a line the payer processed and paid at less than the amount billed. It is not a denial and it is not a rejection. The bill went through. The money is simply light.
Three causes account for most of them. A rate difference — the payer used a different fee-schedule year, or a different level. A unit difference — hours converted into tenths wrongly on one side or the other. And an authorisation difference — the payer trimmed to what it had approved.
A $16.14 gap on one line is not worth an evening. Thirty of them across a year, on a book that bills $3,100–$3,600 a week, is a week’s income — and it is money you already earned, documented and delivered.
The reason short-pays go uncaught is arithmetic, not diligence. Catching them means comparing every paid line to every billed line, on every remittance, for every claimant on a check that covers a dozen of them. Nobody does that reliably by hand at 9 p.m., and the payer has no incentive to correct an error in its own favour that nobody has raised.
When you do catch one, rebill with the original bill and the EOR attached, inside your state’s filing clock.
See short-pay recovery for what automatic line-level comparison looks like, or run one remittance through the free short-pay calculator first.
EOR · Fee schedule · Unit
Fifteen minutes, your state’s codes on screen — or start the trial and poke around on your own.