Billing hazard-site removal: the complete process from call-off to XRechnung

What does “billing hazard-site removal” actually mean?

Gefahrenstellenbeseitigung is almost always handled under a Rahmenvertrag with a municipality or a road authority. The client reports a defect, your firm goes out, removes it and documents the work on a Zettel. What gets billed is not the individual deployment but, as a rule, all deployments of a month together.

The effort therefore lies not in the work on the road but in the chain behind it: every deployment has to stay assigned to the right call-off, every call-off to the right contract and every quantity to the right item – across more than eighty transactions a month.

The five steps at a glance

Step 1: From report to call-off

A call-off is the ordering of an individual job from a running framework contract. It is the anchor everything hangs on later: without a call-off number there is no way to show, at an audit, on what basis you acted.

In practice the report rarely arrives in a form that can be processed directly – a call, an email, sometimes a portal export. What matters is that it becomes a transaction immediately, not at month end from memory.

What belongs on the call-off: date of the report, district, street and house number or chainage, type of hazard, and the number under which the authority records the matter.

Step 2: The Zettel from the site

On site the work comes first and the writing afterwards. What results is a handwritten Zettel with location, date, items executed, quantities and a signature.

That Zettel is not an intermediate step to be rationalised away – on a public contract it is evidence. The crew leader’s signature attests that the work was done this way. Which is why the common advice to “end the paperwork” and capture on a tablet instead is only of limited use in road maintenance: a tablet form produces a data record, a signed Zettel produces a document.

How to combine the two without giving up the paper is set out in Digitising handwritten site sheets .

Step 3: Take-off and assignment

Now the notes become billable quantities. With hazard sites the items are mostly few and they repeat:

It is precisely that repetition which makes the retyping so expensive: it is not difficult, it is uniform and frequent. Anyone with eighty deployments a month types the same three item numbers eighty times.

The quantity determination itself follows REB 23.003 for larger areas. For patches the simple area is usually enough – what matters is that the calculation stays traceable, not that it is complicated.

Step 4: The collective invoice

At month end all approved deployments go to the client as one invoice. With public clients that is an XRechnung to EN 16931, addressed via the authority’s Leitweg-ID.

Three things regularly make such an invoice fail:

1. Wrong or missing Leitweg-ID. The check digits are calculated by the Modulo 97-10 procedure – the same principle as for an IBAN. If they do not match, the portal rejects the invoice before a human sees it.
2. Missing call-off reference. Without the call-off number the case handler cannot assign the work and comes back with a query.
3. Evidence not enclosed. Many authorities expect the take-off sheets as an attachment.

The details on the Leitweg-ID, attachments and the most common grounds for rejection are in XRechnung to the Straßenbauamt .

What the process actually costs per month

The honest calculation runs not over licence costs but over transactions. Take your own figure from last month:

At eighty deployments and ten minutes each that is a little over thirteen hours a month – for the transferring alone. Whether a software roll-out pays off against that depends on exactly that figure and not on a brochure.

The most common mistakes

• The call-off is only created at invoicing time. Then the basis the take-off should refer to is missing.
• Zettel without a district. With several framework contracts it is no longer clear afterwards which contract the deployment belongs to.
• Remaining quantities only in Excel. When an item in the contract runs out, the client notices first.
• No photo of the Zettel. If the paper is lost, the work can no longer be evidenced.

Frequently asked

Does the crew have to operate a tablet? No. The Zettel stays paper and is signed as before. It is digitised later – in the office or on the road with a phone.

Can every deployment be billed individually? Technically yes; the monthly collective invoice is usual. It saves both sides work: you the producing, the authority the checking.

What happens with work outside the contract? It runs as a variation and is shown separately. Letting it run under the contract items comes to light at the check at the latest.

The authority’s reports come in German and they speak fast on the phone. What should we do? Tie the call to a form: date, street, authority reference, type of defect. Four fields are enough, and those are the four questions to ask anyway. If something is unclear, have the address repeated – a case handler does not find that annoying; they find you turning up at the wrong address annoying.

A month, worked through

So the order of magnitude does not stay abstract, here is a month as it occurs in a Berlin firm with a framework contract for hazard sites. The figures are a worked example, not customer data.

From 82 Zettel come around 300 items to be billed. The work on the road accounts for about 100 hours. The capture in the office – sorting Zettel, assigning the call-off, typing the quantities, looking up the item – runs, in our experience, to eight to twelve minutes per site.

At ten minutes that is around 14 hours a month, for the transferring alone. That is close to two working days in which nobody sells, checks or chases anything.

So the question that decides is not “what does the software cost?” but “what do those two days a month cost, and how many of them can be saved?”.

What the auditor at the client actually looks at

Anyone who has once watched an invoice being checked at an authority builds their billing differently. The check runs, as a rule, in this order:

1. Can the invoice be delivered at all? That is decided by the Leitweg-ID, by machine, before any check of the content.
2. Is there a call-off for every invoice line? Without a call-off number the search begins – and the invoice moves to the “query” pile.
3. Does the item match the contract? Item number and unit price are checked against the contract bill of quantities. Deviating prices are almost always transfer errors.
4. Is the quantity evidenced? Here the take-off sheet is consulted. If it is missing, it is the item that is disputed, not the invoice.
5. Is the contract quantity still open? An exhausted item is cut, regardless of whether the work was done.

What stands out is that four of the five checking steps have nothing to do with the work but with the assignment. Anyone who establishes that assignment technically rather than organisationally shortens the check from weeks to days.

When a Zettel is missing

This is not an edge case; it happens in every firm. What matters is that it comes to light while it is still repairable.

A process in which open call-offs without a take-off are visible is therefore not a comfort feature. It is the difference between a query on Tuesday and a written-off item in the quarter.

Immediate measures: when safeguarding has to come first

A reported hazard often tolerates no delay. Legally that is a different case from a planned construction measure, and for billing it has its own requirements.

The process in practice:

1. Safeguard. Safety comes before the formality. Waiting until an order is in hand is wrong.
2. Report. The responsible body is informed without delay – by phone, then in writing.
3. Document. Photos before the measure, with the safeguarding, after the repair. That matters more with an immediate measure than usual, because nobody can check the previous state afterwards.
4. Obtain the order afterwards, if the measure takes longer.

For billing that means: the Zettel of an immediate measure should carry the time of the report and the start of the safeguarding. If the urgency is discussed later – and with it the remuneration for the safeguarding – that is the only evidence.

The route to the order is described in Applying for a traffic order .

In summary

The process is not complicated, it is granular. What makes it expensive is the repetition: the same handling, eighty times a month, with a chain of evidence that can break at every handover. Anyone wanting to change that starts most sensibly where the same work occurs most often – at the transferring of the Zettel.

How Levora takes over that part is on the page about hazard-site removal .