Uncommon cents

This past week, I had the "opportunity" to pay two service contractors--a plumber and a leak detection service--to help with the water leak at our home.

Neither of these services are cheap, but I enjoyed (if that's the right word) paying for one more than the other. Why? Because one of them seemed to recognize the silliness of billing to the penny, while the other did not. The leak detection service charged a whole-dollar amount, $250. Expensive, yes, but it would've taken me days of digging and poking to find the well-hidden leaking valve.

The plumber, on the other hand, billed us $645.50 for the repair of the leaky valve. Again, quite expensive, but there's no way that's a project I would have tackled myself! But really, $0.50 on a $645 bill? That last $0.50 is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount charged! Rather than making me feel like the company was accurately billing me for their services, I was left with the opposite feeling: "Geez, it's already $645 and they have to nickel and dime me for another $0.50?!"

My other thought was "how did they arrive at that last $0.50?" I mean, this was a random sort of job--until you start it, you really don't know how many hours it's going to take, or exactly what you'll find when you do. Case in point, the plumber ran into an issue with the shut-off valve at the street--the casing around it had been bent by some other work another vendor had done, and he spent an extra 30 minutes figuring out how to get it to shut off. So clearly, the bill is an approximation designed to cover such issues, and the presence of the $0.50 is definitely not part of a line-by-line summary of the project's costs.

To me, billing in anything under full dollars once you get about $200 or so is just more trouble than its worth. Vendors, round it off--even if you feel you have to round it up, just don't show me the pennies. It's just makes me feel like you're going out of your way to bill me every single solitary last penny you can. If they'd just told me it was $645 (or even $646), I wouldn't have had such feelings. And your accounting folks will love not having to do math with lots of odd-dollar amounts, saving you some time and money in that department.