Linen delivery tickets and invoices, checked against the contract for your billing desk.

A linen account leaves a trail of small papers: soil pickup records or bag counts, delivery tickets by unit or department, the plant's weights or pack counts, any loss or replacement notes, and behind them the customer's written contract and its billing basis. Your billing desk ties those together, works out what each line should be under that contract, and sends the invoice.

For the test, AI reads copies of those papers and drafts a comparison for each invoice: by unit and department, the item type, the count or weight as written on the ticket, the par level where the contract gives one, the billing basis the contract states, and any loss or replacement language that bears on a line. Whatever doesn't agree goes on a list for a person in billing. Nothing is adjusted or sent, and your reviewer holds every list up against the invoice your desk issued.

One load gets counted three ways. Rhode Island's 2019 request for Eleanor Slater Hospital shows it plainly. The vendor's receipt records bags collected and bundles of each item delivered, and the request sets those bundles: bath towels in fifteens, face cloths in fifties, pillow cases in twenty-fives, patient gowns in sixteens, flat sheets in tens, and fitted sheets in fours to sixes. The billing statement then lists pickup dates and times, the weights picked up, a price per pound of clean laundry and the total charged. Receipts talk in bags and bundles while the bill talks in pounds, so the draft shows each number in the unit it was written and converts nothing unless your contract says how.

Soil weight and clean weight aren't the same number. The University of New Mexico Hospitals' 2017 cost form priced launder and deliver clean linen and soiled pickup as separate lines per pound. HLAC's standards have customer owned goods operations document clean pounds shipped against soil pounds received, and rental operations document fill rates instead. The Association for Linen Management defines a soiled-to-clean ratio per account, and a 2007 American Laundry News article described hospitals recording both weights on a simple daily form, partly to confirm the bill. HLAC also wants load scales calibrated by an outside auditor at least yearly, with the result available to a customer who asks. Each draft line names which weight it rests on, and a weight with no source goes on the list.

Who owns the linen decides who pays when it goes missing. In the Rhode Island request the hospital owns the linen, the vendor replaces anything ruined at its plant or in transit, and the hospital pays for replacement due to staining and normal wear, with soil replacement cost priced on a line of its own. UNM's request made the contractor answer for lost or damaged new linen in its care, to be replaced with the same brand and quality, and sent packing lists and freight bills to UNM for validation against purchase orders. New linen handling there carried monthly charges for receiving and storage. The draft quotes the contract's loss or replacement sentence beside any such charge and leaves the answer to billing.

Par lives at the closet. HLAC says provider and customer set the par level together, and the Association for Linen Management describes a par as the linen used in a 24-hour period, but contracts write it their own way. UNM wanted par level inventories managed at the storage location, nursing unit and clinic level. Its pickup schedule ran by building, floor, department and closet: inpatient units three times a day, every day, most clinics once a day on weekdays, and one cancer center split into five lines by floor and room. A ticket that just says Cancer Center can't be matched to a line like that, so it goes on the list with the lines it might belong to.

What your reviewer will watch. Did each line use the billing basis in the contract in force on that date, signed and dated? Did every unit on a ticket map to a real billing location? Was a make-up delivery billed correctly? Rhode Island, for one, wanted a delayed or partial delivery made up the same or next calendar day, and that can leave two tickets for one scheduled drop. Did the list leave alone every charge the contract allows? A person in billing decides what happens with each difference.

With your reviewer's approval, new invoices get the same comparison for about 30 days before billing releases them.

A person in billing resolves every difference and approves each invoice, which then reaches the customer the way it does today.

The comparison carries on against live work. A next job is a separate decision with its own price.