A small thing that costs a station real money at the end of the year.
Three different situations end up looking identical in most traffic systems, because all three get a 0 typed into the rate field:
- Nobody has priced this yet. It is unfinished work.
- This is a comp. A giveaway, deliberately, for a reason.
- This is a trade. Airtime swapped for goods or services with real value.
They are not the same, and by the time you are looking at a revenue report in January you cannot tell which was which.
What it costs
The station that gave away $14,000 of airtime last year and the station that forgot to price $14,000 of airtime last year have very different problems. One made a series of decisions. The other has a gap in a process.
A column of zeros cannot tell you which you are. Worse, trade is not free at all — the station received something for it — so recording it as zero understates what the airtime actually earned.
How Cartwright handles it
Empty means unpriced. An empty rate is a question, not an answer, and it shows up as unfinished work rather than as revenue of nothing.
Comp and trade are billing types, not rates. You mark the line as what it is, and the reason travels with it. Revenue reporting can then separate sold, comped and traded airtime, because they were recorded as three different things rather than as one number that happened to be zero.
The practical rule when you are entering an order: if you find yourself typing 0 into a rate, stop and ask which of the three you mean. There is a way to say all three, and none of them is 0.
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*Every number in Cartwright is a door, too — if a tile says 6, click it and you get the six records. See what it does, or try it free for 30 days.*