Coates Tree Service

"The customer is correct. I was amazingly unprofessional in my FINAL dealing with the customer but up to that point communications were professional. The job was originally quoted as $1600 for labor and $100 for dump. Customer questioned the estimator as to how he arrived at the cost. 20 hours of labor were estimated and our labor rate is $80/man hr. including travel. Thru some phone calls etc. it was finally agreed that we would bill as a "Time Job". When the invoice went out, it was for the original quote ($1700 plus tax) as the estimator did not inform the office that the job was changed to a "time job". The moment I discovered this error, I analyzed the job and provided a legitimate adjusted invoice for the job and apologized to the customer for the error. The adjusted invoice was for 5 crew hours for 3 men plus herbicide to kill the tree roots and a dump charge. The amount of the invoice was $1277.25. Apparently, he never read the email I provided with the adjusted invoice. Some time passed and we received another email indicating that my revised invoice was not acceptable because it included travel time in the charges. All of our jobs have travel included whether specified or not. Until the customers are able to bring their trees to our office, we will continue to bill for the time it takes to get to the job. In the end I became exasparated by this customer'[Member Information Removed] nit picking and my final email (the un-professional part) stated: EMAIL: " [Member Name Removed], if you read the time job contract which explains our policy re travel and you read my explanation of how the time was calculated you will clearly see that we DID NOT charge for lunch and in fact we did not charge for 45 minutes of time. Why don't you just send payment for what you think you should pay and we will be done with this and you can stop crying." The customer eventually sent a check to our office for $960.78 a full $316.47 short. He did not include any $ for either the dump costs or the herbicide that was used and even calculated the tax incorrectly. None of the above amounts include any tax as that would just confuse this even more. So in summary: I got tired of a customer'[Member Information Removed] back and forth on what the bill should be and lost my cool."