HERE IS MY ORIGINAL EMAIL SENT THIS MORNING:

We should be able to charge zero dollars for something and still pay our inspector their full payroll. And we chalk it up to a marketing expense or something else. For instance, say we offer to do a free inspection for a top broker in our area either for their own house or for their client. Or it is for a family member or close friend and we don’t charge them but one of our inspectors still gets paid. That is our decision to have that expenditure and we don’t want to call it a discount. As it is now we have to charge full price and then take the discount of the full price. Then when I run my reports for the year it looks like we gave out thousands and thousands in discounts. I could never know the true number of discounts we gave out that were actually discounts or promotions.

We also create “fake” orders for our inspectors in training for them to do practice inspections on their own homes or friends or family’s homes. They need to do a bunch of these all on their own, as if they are real orders and real inspections, once they are done training with Matt and before they are taking inspections of their own. We need it to mimic real transactions, so we create an order, Spectora creates a template, they receive the orders on their device and in their calendar, and they go to work for the day. We need to be able to create an order in ISN and have Spectora grab that info and have it on the inspector’s calendar, and all of that. Just like a real inspection. And they do get paid for this training.

But probably the main reason we would charge a small amount and then discount it back so the total is zero, would be to create a template for Spectora, our inspection software. There are multiple reasons why we might want an order made up but we don’t want agreements or invoices associated with that order. If there are 2 properties on one lot, each house would get it’s own order since there are 2 addresses and we need 2 templates created in Spectora (which obviously creates one template per order). Currently we have one agreement for each service (GHI, sewer, radon, mold, etc) and that is already too many agreements to sign in my opinion. So currently I am putting all services on one order so we send out one set of agreements and one invoice.

So I guess for now I have to charge at least what the inspector’s payroll is and then discount it back. In essence I will be creating thousands of dollars of fake discounts every week. That is how often we may have one of the scenarios mentioned above. Again, giving me false reports at the end of the year for discounts given.

If it could just pay the inspector what I have set for that service, no matter what is filled out in the fees box, that is what I would like it to do. In essence, do what is commanded and pay no attention to the fees charged.

And on a side SIDE note, I would love to be able to choose a service and not have to assign a dollar amount to it. I want to choose a GHI (or whatever service) and assign $0 to it and have it still show up as a service in the fee box. They are sort of related but could be implemented separately. Thank you!

Hey mwaddell, thanks for your feedback! I have a few more questions for you: