Case Study · Property & Portfolio Management
The elevator invoice that billed the same visit twice
A portfolio manager finally checked a routine elevator invoice against the contract. One technician, one visit, two units — but two separate trip charges, plus a lubrication service already included in the annual price. Industry audits put charges like this on nearly four in every ten elevator invoices. Nobody had been checking.
Why it happens
Vertical transport, HVAC, and other vendor-serviced systems run on multi-year contracts that get signed once and reread almost never. Invoices get approved against a budget line, not against the clause that actually governs what is included.
None of it looks alarming line by line — $170 here, $85 there, too small to fight over on its own. Multiplied across dozens of buildings and years of auto-renewing contracts, the same charges get paid twice and three times, and nobody ever adds it up.
Portfolios compound it further. The same vendor can hold a full-maintenance contract on one building and a bare-bones inspection contract on another, and because nobody ever puts the two side by side, an auto-renewed contract can sit at double the per-unit price of a comparable building down the street for years without anyone noticing.
When the pattern finally gets bad enough to notice, the fix is a management consultant charging thousands of dollars to do by hand what should have been automatic: pulling years of invoices and timesheets to reconstruct a problem a live check against the contract would have nipped in the bud.
The Canary difference
Canary reads every service contract and reconciles every invoice line against the clause that actually governs it. A preventive visit rebilled as an "additional service call," or travel charged twice for a single trip, gets flagged before the payment run, not discovered months later.
Canary also benchmarks contracts against each other across the portfolio, so a building paying twice the per-unit rate of a comparable property on the same vendor surfaces the moment the pattern exists, not at the next renewal nobody remembers to renegotiate.