The idea of a full service appointment is that it allows time to take care of things that pianos invariably need but may vary from piano to piano. I prefer to just have the time built in to be able to fix what needs fixing as long as it can be accomplished within the time frame of the appointment. Better that than spending 15 minutes explaining a repair that takes 15 minutes and for which you charge only 15 minutes even though you took 30 to explain why you need to do it and why it will cost an extra 15 minutes worth of your time. Haven't met a piano yet that didn't need something other than just tuning. If it's a more time consuming repair then I probably don't have enough time scheduled to do it anyway and will need to schedule a follow up appointment. The problem of rush jobs (as Don M. described) are easily taken care of by my "rush" charge:-)! If my normal appointment is an hour and they only give me 30 minutes then my rush charge is 100%. Yes, that's a joke. There is an overriding minimum on all appointments unless I'm the one who cuts it short for some reason. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Gerald Groot Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2010 2:02 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] billing dilemma with pitch raises And, where do you stop the so called level of "minor repairs?" Is a broken key considered a minor repair? After all, it will probably "only take" an additional 20 minutes or so, to fix it? With so many parts inside of a piano, how can one include "minor repairs" in your tuning fee without also knowing the amount of time involved? If you give set aside a 2 hour time frame for tuning and only use 1 hour, do you still charge for 2 hours? Charging by the hour is common in all business areas. Giving away something as being included in a tuning fee is usually done frequently in the piano tuning profession. A car tune up is a car tune up. That doesn't include outside "minor repairs." Nor do they consider it a nuisance of explaining and figuring charges for every trifle. Last time I looked, they even charged me to fill up my window washer fluid. Never mind the fact that it was nearly full when I drove in there. J Jer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101031/44fda40f/attachment.htm>
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