Commercial kitchen repair invoice audit
Upload the service contract and the repair invoice. Ladgerline returns a line-by-line coverage report in about 36 seconds, showing which charges the contract covers, which you genuinely owe, and which it does not settle either way — with the exact clause and page number behind every finding.
What gets checked
Six questions, asked of every line.
Four of these have exact answers and are computed in ordinary code rather than asked of a model. Only coverage itself is a judgement call.
Is the work even inside the term?
The service date is compared against the contract's start and end dates in code, not by a model. Work performed after a term expired is the single most common reason an entire invoice is not covered — and the easiest thing to miss when the contract is a scan in a shared drive.
Is this the equipment you actually insured?
Most agreements cover a named schedule of units by serial number. A technician who fixes the griddle while on site for the walk-in has done billable work, whether or not anyone said so at the time. The serial on the invoice is matched against the schedule in the contract.
Does this plan cover labour, or only parts?
A parts-only plan and a parts-and-labour plan produce opposite answers on the same labour line. On a parts-only plan the technician's hours are legitimately billable and saying otherwise would damage your relationship with a vendor who did nothing wrong.
Did the cause of failure trigger an exclusion?
A component named in the coverage clause stops being covered if the technician's own report attributes the failure to misuse, impact, missed cleaning or a power event. Exclusions turn on the cause, not the component, which is why the service report is worth uploading.
Was labour billed above the contracted rate?
Hourly rates are compared arithmetically, including an authorised after-hours or emergency premium where the contract grants one. A premium the contract permits is not a finding, and reporting it as one would cost you credibility.
Do the line items actually sum to the total?
Lines plus tax against the stated total, checked exactly. Transcription errors on scanned invoices surface here, and so does the occasional invoice that simply does not add up.
Equipment
Any unit your agreement schedules.
Ladgerline reads the contract rather than a fixed list of equipment types, so the units it handles are whichever units your agreement names. In practice that means the full spread of a commercial kitchen:
- Walk-in coolers and freezers, reach-ins, prep tables and blast chillers
- Combi ovens, convection ovens, ranges, fryers, griddles and holding cabinets
- Dish machines, warewashers, booster heaters and disposal units
- Ice machines, beverage systems and under-counter refrigeration
- Ventilation hoods, make-up air and refrigeration racks
Refrigeration invoices carry their own vocabulary — refrigerant allowances, reclamation fees, compressor cause-of-failure — and have a dedicated page covering how those charges are assessed.
What you get
A report you can send.
Every audit produces the same artifact: an executive summary splitting the invoice into what looks recoverable, what needs confirming and what you genuinely owe; a charge-by-charge ledger where each line expands to the reasoning and the quoted clause; the contract's own terms as the software read them; and a draft email to the vendor that you edit and send yourself.
The report exports to PDF and CSV, so it can go into a finance system or straight to whoever approves payment. Ladgerline never contacts your vendor.
Findings are a first-pass assessment, not legal advice, and no outcome is guaranteed. Every finding cites the clause it relies on so you can check it yourself before disputing a charge.
Questions
Before you upload anything.
What documents do I need to run an audit?
The service contract or warranty and the repair invoice, as PDFs or plain text. The technician's service report is optional, but it is what decides whether an exclusion applies, so include it when you have it. Scans are transcribed automatically.
What if my contract has no expiry date?
Many agreements state an effective date and roll over annually. The coverage-period check reports that it could not confirm the term, and the audit continues — exclusions, scope and rate caps are all still assessed. An unconfirmed term does not stop the rest of the review.
Does it work on a scanned contract?
Yes. A PDF with no text layer is transcribed once by a vision model and the transcription is cached against the file, so you never pay to read the same contract twice. In testing, a scanned contract and its clean digital original produced identical extraction.
Will it tell me to dispute something I actually owe?
It is built to avoid that. Charges the contract legitimately permits are marked payable, not recoverable, and where the contract is silent the answer is 'requires confirmation' rather than a finding. Under-claiming costs money; over-claiming costs you a vendor relationship.
Do I need a subscription?
No. $20 for a single audit, $79 for five, $279 for twenty. Credits do not expire and there is no seat licence. One incorrectly billed $300 charge covers fifteen audits.
Read first
Know what your contract says.
What commercial kitchen service contracts actually cover
Most disputes over a repair invoice come down to one question the contract already answers: which plan covers this piece of equipment, and what did that plan exclude?
6 min read →How to dispute a repair invoice, with the clause that backs you
"This looks wrong" is easy to wave off. A section number and a page reference is not. The difference between those two emails is most of the outcome.
5 min read →Six charges worth questioning on a repair invoice
These are not signs of dishonesty. They are the line items that default settings and busy back offices produce, and they survive precisely because they look unremarkable.
5 min read →Can missed maintenance void your coverage?
"Lack of required maintenance" is the most powerful exclusion in a service contract, because it can turn an obviously covered failure into an uncovered one. It is also the exclusion most often applied more broadly than the contract allows.
6 min read →What to do when a coverage claim is declined
A declined claim usually arrives as a single sentence with no clause attached. Most of the work of overturning one is simply making the vendor say precisely which term they are relying on.
5 min read →What to check before you renew a service contract
Most service contracts renew on substantially the same terms as last year, which is exactly the problem: the schedule has drifted, the rates have moved, and the exclusions have quietly grown.
6 min read →Refrigerant charges: what you can actually be billed for
Refrigerant lines are unusually easy to overbill, because almost nobody verifies the quantity, and coverage for the gas is often separate from coverage for the repair that lost it.
5 min read →Is a failed compressor covered? It depends on why it failed
A compressor is usually the largest line on a refrigeration invoice and is almost always named in the coverage clause. Whether it is actually paid for turns on the cause of failure, not the part.
6 min read →What a service report has to say before an exclusion applies
A contract sets out the conditions under which coverage is excluded. The service report is what supplies the facts. Where the report is vague, the exclusion usually cannot be made to stick.
5 min read →Ice machine repairs and the water treatment clause
Nearly every ice machine declination comes back to scale and the filtration clause. It is a legitimate exclusion, and it is also applied to failures that have nothing to do with water.
5 min read →Deductibles, caps and the limits that quietly reduce coverage
Coverage is not binary. Four separate mechanisms — deductibles, per-unit caps, annual aggregates and component sub-limits — can each reduce what a covered repair actually pays.
5 min read →Manufacturer warranty or service contract — which one pays?
Most kitchens hold manufacturer warranties, extended warranties and service contracts side by side. Paying under the wrong one is one of the easiest billing errors to make and the hardest to notice.
5 min read →The equipment schedule decides more claims than the coverage clause
Coverage clauses get read closely and equipment schedules get filed. That is backwards: the schedule decides whether the coverage clause applies at all.
5 min read →Trip charges, travel time and the response-time clause
Travel is billed in at least three different ways, often more than once for the same journey, and usually with no clause specifically authorising it.
5 min read →Combi ovens and steamers: scale, water treatment and coverage
Combi ovens and steamers boil water continuously, so scale is the dominant failure mechanism — and the dominant reason a repair on one gets declined.
5 min read →How parts are priced, and what the contract says about it
Coverage decides whether a part is chargeable. The pricing clause decides what it costs. The second question is asked far less often than the first.
5 min read →Is a torn door gasket covered? Check whether it counts as a wear item
Door gaskets turn up on almost every refrigeration invoice. Whether you pay for one is usually settled by where the contract puts it — in the parts it supplies, or on a list of wear items it does not — before anyone asks how it tore.
5 min read →Is a failed evaporator fan motor covered? Look at what stopped it
When the evaporator fan stops, a walk-in or reach-in warms within hours. The motor is usually named in the coverage clause, so the argument is about what stopped it — and the most expensive part of the failure is often not on the repair invoice at all.
5 min read →Is a dish machine wash pump covered? First, find out who owns the machine
A failed wash pump stops the dish line, and the repair is a substantial one. Before asking whether your service contract covers it, establish which agreement the machine belongs to — because it may not be your service contract at all.
5 min read →