has anyone ever heard of sending an insurance company two bills for multiple repairs? Most insurance companies pay for up to 3 repairs, but if there are 5 chips that need fixed, i have heard of people that make another work order for the additional 2 and have the client call in to report another claim a week later. Is this right?
Part of me says that if the client would have gotten each chip repaired when each chip occured it would have been ok, obviously. But since the client waited to get their windshield repaired and now they have 5 chips is it right to bill for two separate cases? Even though the client had insurance when the damage happend to the vehicle from the very first chip.
T-Bone,
You bring up an interesting and valid point! I never looked at it that way! If each break happened at different times, which is more than likely, and the customer put in a claim for each time than the insurance company would have paid $50 plus/minus for each repair. The only problem there might be that his premiums would be raised for having so many glass claims!
Personally, I would handle it as one claim and charge the insurance whatever you are contracted for. You could always tell the customer that because the ins. only pays for 3 repairs that he needs to pay for the additional two.
T-Bone, indeed this is one of the things that are wrong in our trade. In fact you are hitting an open nerve here and that is probably one of the reasons why you are not getting all that many replies.
At the time of my reply there were 24 views, but just 1 reply.
I don’t care to reply, it is always better to be open, honest and proactive, and openly discuss the things that bother us in our trade, instead of ignoring and hiding those >or worse, to be always accepting negative changes. To my best knowledge it used to happen here in Europe as well, there are some cases known, not sure if it still does happen, but I have no reasons to believe that things have changed.
Is it okay to claim the work in this manner? No certainly not! But I have been long enough around in this trade (and have been dealing with almost all insurers, fleets etc. at head office level) to know pretty much exactly how the inurers think and why some frustrating steps were introduced.
I also know how many co-workers and fellow repairers throughout the country feel about this.
Does this ‘flexible thinking’ harm our trade? Sure! But insurers are being fooled and ripped off every day and it is easier for them to come up with solutions in order to attempt to have more grip on what we, the service vendors do, than to check all incoming claims individually. With this being said, and with all respect to the insurance industry, but their solutions are too often negative for our trade, hit the bad guys very hard, including the fraudulent insured client, and leave the honest and hard working vendors claim what they feel is about right for their business -within reasonable limits. Also; horizontal price fixing is prohibited over here, there are very hefty fines, yet the insurers come away with it so far.
It is just NOT possible to compare the repair prices a repair only tech needs to charge, and the often lower prices the general replacers are charging.
It is not done, in fact unfair, to compare the prices on a one on one basis since repair only guys have no escape option to a mouth-watering expensive replacement that brings in a lot of cash. A repair only tech just cannot stunt with his or her repair prices, where replacers often stunt with theirs just to lure the customer >and replace the glass in more than 5 out of 10 jobs being offered.
We all know how frustrating it can be to be travelling for 60 mins for a repair order, jobs like this do happen and are simply not profitable. Our business costs vary per area, even per job.
It is not easy to find the proper balance here, I for one do realize that, but one thing is for sure, the way things are executed today is all wrong and totally out of proportions.
It is therefore easy to see and explain why things like this are happening. a) some insurers introduced a silly system, they use a maximum tariff for one or more repairs, that maximum is only 75% of the standard repair rate.
b) other insurers introduced a 'fair price' or ‘flat rate’ policy....very similar to the above.
Cut backs in the payments are just not good. People are than willing to bend the rules and think flexible, which leads to ‘new alternatives and all new solutions’. Again, not good but it happens. Many WSR guys have been fighting and strugling because their attempts to make money and survive are frustrated over and over again by most insurers and leasing companies over here.
We, being repairs only and pretty well known, are seeing cut backs in our payments as well, not by all insurers and not even in all situations at insurers who do cut invoices, it varies per policy, but we find any cut back one too many, it is just not done.
Am I allowed to cut back the car- or health insurance invoice, just because I believe that what I am willing to pay should do? I don’t think so. In fact, they will hunt you until the very last cents are being paid. And when you’re really unfortunate, you’ll be excommunicated.
We are almost sixteen years in business and our repair tarif has never been changed (not even with the conversion to the Euro our new Euro prices were pretty close to the old prices, just a few cents off in our advantage).
Are we giving in and change our tarifs? No of course not, this is not a matter of us being in the wrong, it are the insurers. Every time when we are processing invoices, we continue to use our own standard tarif, but we already know in advance that some insurers will be cutting.
This was a long reply, but again, things are not always simple.
