Our engineering services are conducted or supervised by a professional engineer that will be performing the analysis / design recommendations for your project. We occasionally have a need to rely on third-party vendors to do specific lab/field testing that we do not have the in-house capability or could be perceived as a conflict of interest if we did such lab/field testing.

For large projects, we have agreements with other engineering company’s to borrow additional engineering support as necessary to complete large size jobs. The following outlines our fees, and company policies to which are agreed too by retaining this firm. A copy of which will be included within your private customer’s portal.

FEE SCHEDULE
Forensic and/or Geo-structural Forensic
Engineering Services:
Std rate: $375/ hour with a 1-hour minimum. Please note: we bill for travel time, see “Travel Time” below.
Hazard rate: $550/ hour in 1-hour increments.
—— modifiers —————-
Overtime: 1.5x
Weekends/late Night: 2x
Legal proceedings: $625/hr

Technician Services:
Std rate: $100/ hour
Overtime: 1.5 x
Weekends/late Night: 2 x

Drafting Services:
Std rate: $75/ hour
Overtime: 1.5 x
Weekends/late Night: 2 x

Office Staff:
Std rate: $50/ hour
Overtime: 1.5 x
Weekend/late Night: 2 x

All external Parts and Services provided at Cost plus 15% for pay periods less than or equal to 30 days from receipt of invoice.

TERMS OF OUR SERVICES

All open invoices greater than 30 day due date, will be charged a late fee of $350 every 30 day billing cycle and related interest rate 18%.  This is same interest rate that the Company’s account gets charged.  Please contact Accounting for the specific interest rate.

Credit Card Payments

By popular request, we provide for credit card payment through Venmo.

Travel Time

Our commodity is the time of our engineers.  We charge for travel time.  If the engineer was at the office, he would otherwise be able to complete reports faster and would otherwise be engaged in billable services to the company.  As our engineers need to travel in many cases hours to get to the job site, it is only reasonable that we bill the standard rate for their travel.  All negotiations on the cost of travel, such as time, airfare, etc. need to be performed prior to engagement; otherwise, it is our policy to charge Time and Materials (T&M) consistent with the schedule above.

Retainers

It is our policy to request a retainer for ‘out of town’ work for clients that do not have a history of open ended delivery contracts.   Out of town is defined as work that is greater than 45 minutes travel from the office as determined by the metrics on maps.Google.com. A retainer is not a warranty or any other perception of an agreement that the job will be performed for that amount.  Work and expenses are billed against the retainer.  Any residual in the Retainer account will be returned at project completion.

Contract for Services

This web page outlining the services is the agreement between parties  if a written contract to the contrary is not signed by this firm before commencement of work.

Homer Parker, PE , Homer Parker Engineering, or Parker Engineering, LLC will not sign a contract for engineering services after the submission of product.  If you, the client or the client’s representative, have a contract that you intend to withhold payment until signed please be aware that under this agreement for engagement of this engineering firm and its engineers, you are agreeing to pay for services rendered as this is the only contract of service being agreed upon by this engineering firm and its engineers.  Please note that a release of lien is not being discussed as a contract.  You agree to pay for all legal and court costs, fines, penalties,  interest, lost income, and other related economic damages caused to this firm by withholding payment as a hostage to an attempt obtaining a signature for an unseen contract.

Unless agreed upon before the start of work, the rate of services, retainers,  travel time, late fees, fines and penalties, document retention policy and limits of liability as found on this page and found also copied into the terms of service page attached to the project home page.

Document Retention Policy

Paper items of a physical nature that are generated by the engineer such as the field notes, marked up drawings are electronically retained for a minimum of 10 years; please note the following exceptions:

Items such as concrete cores, or other physical “evidence” that the client asks for us to store will be  subject to storage charges as a function of either sample volume size or the costs necessary to preserve the samples.  If your billing statements do not show “storage” charges, please do not assume we are retaining your samples.

Items such as “original” drawings or “one of a kind” documents or drawings are typically not stored or otherwise retained by us.    If you provide us with an “original” or “one of a kind” item, it will be duplicated and return as it is our company policy NOT TO STORE OR RETAIN ORIGINAL OR ONE-OF-A-KIND DRAWINGS OR DOCUMENTS. See the Section below on ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS.

Digital items such as the report, computations, and photographs are also only retained for a minimum of 10 years.

Original Documents

In the normal course of business, if you, the client, identify any drawings that are “original” such as Mylar sheets, etc., we will have copies made and have the original returned to you.   Similarly, for any “one of a kind” type document, we would request that  the client supply a copy.    We DO NOT STORE “ORIGINAL” OR “ONE OF A KIND” drawings or documents supplied to us.

We will arrange for documents to be copied by a third party vendor and an appropriate charge for the time and materials to a) copy the document and b) pay for the return of the document.

Our clients have the responsibility to identify in advance that a document, plan, etc., is either an “original” or “one of a kind” at the time of the document transfer.

Limits of LIABILITY

Because of the typically disproportional liability between the product produced and the amount paid for services, that unless agreed too in advance of the start of work, the limits of liability is limited to the amount invoiced.

We are not equipped with x-ray vision, etc.. Thus we are not responsible and make no representations of responsibility for conditions are out of sight, hidden, or otherwise inaccessible to make an observation by our engineers.

OSHA and SAFE WORK CONDITIONS

We provide OSHA required protection engineers for our workers..  Parker Engineering does not perform work on unsafe work conditions such as a wet roof, etc.  If a unsafe conditions exits, there will be an extra charge to return to the site after unsafe condition has been abated.

“As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it.”

Henry Petroski, American engineer and author specializing in failure analysis