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The Wordsmiths Line Counting Standards

by April Maddox, CMT

As there is no industry standard in regards to counting lines and billing clients, there is much ambiguity, confusion, and inability of clients to verify the accuracy of invoiced charges. The lack of a standardized tool for measuring compounds the issue. To avoid this disparity and give clients the control they deserve, we explain in detail our method for calculating line count and provide our measurement tool for verification.

Let's start with a few basic definitions that have been adopted by the leading industry organizations: AHDI, AHIMA, & MTIA.

Gross character - Any letter, number, symbol, or function key necessary for the final appearance and content of a document, including the space bar, and carriage return.
Net character - Printed characters only.
Net line - A defined line length that includes a predetermined number of gross characters (65 in our case).
Gross line - Any printed line that has one or more characters.
Keystroke - Each stroke of a key is counted - including the space bar, carriage return, underscore, bold, etc.
Net word - A net word is defined as five alpha/numeric characters plus one space for a total of six characters.
Recorded minute - One recorded minute of dictation is equal to an average of 777 gross characters for Medical Records dictation.

Over the years, the definition of a line has varied significantly in terms of character count. The range has typically been from 55 to 80 keystrokes. More recently, a 65-character line has emerged as somewhat of an industry standard, although a wide range of variation continues to exist. However, even as this standard has emerged, there continues to be significant controversy over gross characters, net characters, macro characters, etc. In other words, a 65-character line can still mean different things to different people. For example, try to calculate the following phrase:

ambiguous charges

Now, you may think that this consists of 16 alpha characters plus one space, totaling 17 characters. You would be correct if using the gross character method; but take into account the common practice of billing by keystroke. This would actually be charged as 51 characters because the bold and underlined characters count as 3 keystrokes each! Using the keyboard, this means hitting CTRL + U and CTRL + B in addition to the actual letters in the phrase. Granted, that does technically add 6 additional keystrokes (CTRL + U + B to start and CTRL + U + B to finish), but using this method, you actually get charged as if the extra formatting keys are typed with each letter.

In addition, some companies actually have two ways of measuring a line - one for billing purposes and one for wage payment purposes. The idea is to create a small spread - bill for all keystrokes while paying only for net characters. I personally feel that this practice is unethical and underhanded. Plus, that would be a nightmare for calculating statistics.

The following invoice example shows how we calculate our charges for clients (which is the exact same method used to calculate payment to transcriptionists).

We use Files Word Count* (provided to our customers and transcriptionists for verification) as our counting tool to figure the character count based on gross characters. We then divide the gross characters by 65 to come up with the net lines. The line count is then multiplied by your cost per line to equal the total due for each document. The characters in the sample are the actual amount of characters in this document (each character and space between but not including '{}') as counted by Files Word Count.*

*(freeware found at http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Other-Office-Tools/Files-Word-...)