A Friday afternoon rework job
The client emails at lunchtime: a retailer has rejected their barcodes, can you relabel 3,000 units before Monday's collection? Of course you can. The shift supervisor pulls three people off picking, someone prints labels, and the job is done by six. The client is grateful.
Nobody raises a charge. The email is in the supervisor's inbox, the paper job sheet is in a tray, and at month end the billing person sees the storage and pick charges from the WMS but not this. It happens again the following week with a gift-set build for a different client.
Why the extra work slips through
Your WMS records the activity it controls: receipts, picks, dispatches. Value-added work mostly happens outside it, at a bench, with stock taken out of location and put back as something slightly different. There is no transaction, so there is nothing for billing to see.
| Type of job | Why it goes unbilled |
|---|---|
| Relabelling or re-barcoding | Urgent, agreed by phone, no quote raised |
| Kitting and gift-set builds | Components and labour recorded on paper, if at all |
| Inserts and marketing leaflets | Added at packing, counted nowhere |
| Re-bagging and quality checks | Treated as part of returns or goods in |
| Photography or sample picks | Done as a favour |
Pricing is the other gap. Unless a rate card covers the job, someone has to work out a charge afterwards, and it is easier to leave it than to have that conversation.
What the unbilled work adds up to
Labour you paid for and did not recover. Agency hours spent on rework that nobody can tie back to a client. And a distorted view of which clients are profitable, because the ones who ask for the most favours look better on paper than they are.
Clients are rarely upset to be charged for work they asked for, if the request and the work are clearly recorded. What they dispute is a surprise line with no detail.
How we capture and bill it
- A request form for clients, or an email address that turns requests into jobs, capturing what, how many and by when.
- Pricing against the client's rate card, with a quote sent back for approval when the job type has no agreed rate.
- A job card on a tablet at the bench: who worked on it, start and finish, quantity completed, materials used, photos of the finished item.
- Stock movements written to your WMS: components consumed and finished kits created where it applies.
- A billing line generated when the job is closed, collected with the month's other charges and sent to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, or into your existing billing process.
- A monthly summary per client of value-added work and labour, so the account manager can see where time went.
What billing sees afterwards
Every job that was done has a record, a price and a person's name against it. Month end picks up value-added charges automatically. When a client queries a line, you can show the request, the approval and the photo of the finished work.
Supervisors also get a view of how much bench labour is going to each client, which helps with planning when several brands want rework in the same week.
Is your 3PL giving work away?
- Rework and kitting requests arrive by email or phone.
- Job sheets are paper and filed in a tray.
- Month-end billing comes only from WMS transactions.
- You are not sure how many hours went on value-added work last month.
- Some clients get a lot of favours that never appear on invoices.