For a typical 10-person surveying firm, the fully-loaded cost of a re-visit is in the $600 to $1,200 range -- crew time, truck operating cost, processing rework, and the opportunity cost of the job that didn't happen that day. At an industry-average re-visit rate of 8 to 12 percent of jobs, a 200-job-per-year firm is spending $14,000 to $30,000 annually on rework that wouldn't exist if the original setup error had been caught at the truck. The cost compounds with discovery latency: a bust caught in the field costs minutes, the same bust caught back at the office costs hours, and the same bust caught a week later costs a re-visit.
What counts as a re-visit
A re-visit is any return trip to a site to re-shoot, re-measure, or re-collect data that should have been captured correctly the first time. It is not a planned phased visit (a topo today and a stakeout next week is one job, not a re-visit). The cause is almost always one of:
- A bust in the field (rod height not reset, wrong code on a critical point, missed shot of a corner)
- Setup error (backsight typed wrong, wrong control point referenced)
- Equipment failure mid-shot (data collector crash, total-station alignment drift)
- A QC catch in the office that requires field verification
Industry studies consistently put the re-visit rate at 8 to 12 percent of jobs across small-to-mid-sized firms. Some firms run it as low as 3 percent through aggressive QC; others run it as high as 20 percent in pathological cases. The shape of the distribution matters more than the average – the firm with 20 percent re-visits has a process problem, not a luck problem.
The math, line by line
A representative case: 10-person firm, 200 jobs per year, 10 percent re-visit rate, average re-visit consumes a half-day of crew time.
| Component | Per re-visit | Annual (20 re-visits) |
|---|---|---|
| Crew labor (2 people × 4 hours × $55/hr fully loaded) | $440 | $8,800 |
| Truck operating cost ($1.20/mile × 60 round-trip miles) | $72 | $1,440 |
| Office processing rework (1.5 hours × $80/hr) | $120 | $2,400 |
| Equipment depreciation share (1 unit-day × $40) | $40 | $800 |
| Direct subtotal | $672 | $13,440 |
| Schedule slip cost (delayed deliverable, lost project velocity) | $200-$400 | $4,000-$8,000 |
| Opportunity cost (job not done that afternoon, half-revenue) | $200-$600 | $4,000-$12,000 |
| Indirect subtotal | $400-$1,000 | $8,000-$20,000 |
| Fully-loaded total | $1,072-$1,672 | $21,440-$33,440 |
Several caveats worth flagging:
- The labor rates above use fully-loaded cost (wages × 1.4 to cover benefits, training, equipment, overhead). The headline hourly rate the firm pays is roughly two-thirds of these numbers.
- Truck operating cost includes fuel, maintenance, insurance amortization, and depreciation per the ATA’s commercial-trucking line items. This is the real per-mile cost, not just gas.
- Opportunity cost is the most variable line item. A firm with a backlog the size of which they can’t keep up takes the highest end – every afternoon that doesn’t produce billable hours has a real revenue gap. A firm with slack capacity takes the lower end.
- Schedule slip cost is a downstream cascade – the customer who was promised a deliverable on Friday now gets it Tuesday, and that customer’s project that was waiting on the survey now slips a week. This is hardest to quantify and easiest to underestimate.
The headline number for our representative firm: roughly $21,000 to $33,000 per year on re-visits, before any indirect-customer-relationship damage. Most firms we’ve talked to are surprised by the indirect column. They count crew hours and forget the rest.
Where the cost actually concentrates
The interesting structural property of re-visit cost is that it compounds with discovery latency. Same bust, very different cost depending on when you catch it:
| When caught | Cost | What it takes to fix |
|---|---|---|
| In the field, same setup | ~$5 (a minute of crew time) | Re-shoot the point, log the correction |
| In the field, before leaving the site | ~$30 (15 minutes of crew time) | Re-occupy the prior setup, re-shoot |
| In the truck, on the way out | ~$60 (return to site, 30 minutes) | Possibly find the monument is gone, re-establish |
| In the office, that afternoon | ~$240 (half-day for crew the next morning) | Schedule a same-week re-visit |
| In the office, next day | ~$670 (half-day re-visit + processing rework) | Re-visit, customer call to explain delay |
| In the office, week+ later | ~$1,200+ (full re-visit + relationship damage) | Re-visit, schedule slip, possibly free-of-charge to the customer |
The same setup error costs 240x as much when caught in the office a week later as when caught in the field at the moment of the bust. This is the key economic argument for shifting QC left – not because office-side QC is wrong, but because each step earlier in the discovery chain compresses the cost dramatically.
Why field-side QC matters
If you accept the discovery-latency curve above, the question becomes: which busts can be caught at the truck, and what does it take to catch them?
The category of busts that are most catchable at the truck:
- Rod-height inconsistency. Crew set the rod for 5.0 ft on the back-sight, didn’t switch back to the actual prism height for the foresights. Detectable at the truck if the data collector’s QC checks elevation deltas against expected.
- Coordinate-out-of-bounds. A fat-finger entry put a point 2,000 feet north of the project area. Detectable at the truck if the data collector cross-checks against the project’s expected extent.
- Backsight precision miss. The backsight residual is 0.04 ft when the spec says 0.02 ft. The crew can re-occupy the setup before packing up, instead of catching it three days later in CAD.
- Code mismatches. Crew shot 47 fence-line points and 3 manhole points; one of the manholes was actually a tree at the same coordinate. Detectable if the QC engine flags clusters of unexpected codes.
- Z-spike. A point lands 30 feet above its neighbors due to a rod-height mistake or accidentally hitting a rooftop instead of grade. Detectable in real-time against a moving local average.
The category of busts that are NOT catchable at the truck:
- Cross-job consistency errors. “This boundary doesn’t match the adjacent boundary we surveyed in 2018.” Office-side QC.
- Final deliverable validation. “Did we capture all the easement corners on the title commitment?” Office-side QC, often involves comparison to a separate document.
- PLS sign-off review. The Professional Land Surveyor’s stamp goes on after office review. Always.
The right model: field-side QC to catch the obvious in real time; office-side QC to catch the subtle and to do the legal review. They’re complementary, not substitutes. The cost win is from doing the field-side QC consistently, not from eliminating office-side QC.
What this means for tooling
Most modern data collectors do some QC – backsight precision, distance limits, coordinate reasonableness. They do less than they could, mostly because they’re optimized for the experienced PLS who already knows what to check rather than the early-career field tech who needs the QC to be automatic.
The next post in this series goes deeper on the specific QC checks worth running at the truck, and which ones we ship in PointScout Mobile. The short version: a phone-paired companion app is the right form factor because it’s the device the field tech already has in their pocket, and a free download is more deployable than a per-seat data-collector software upgrade.
Want to see what a field-side QC actually catches?
PointScout Mobile is free on the Play Store, runs on any modern Android device including the rugged tablets your crews probably already use, and the QC checks fire automatically as points come in. No signup, no card.
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