Bill, all of them I have done are hard at first. All of them get easier as you get more familiar and become more organized.

I have done over 3000 audits with Maritz and only two of the clients have a bugaboo about times. One of them flags your shop if you take less than 30 minutes to complete it and the other flags your shop if you take more than 12 hours to debrief it.

Since I have done so many shops, I can do the first type which does not have any purchase requirements in 15-20 minutes depending on the footprint size of the location and how busy the station is. But when I enter the time, I have to justify why I was able to do it so quickly so it's often easier to just say it took 30 minutes. The only time I don't do this is when I am doing a serial route where several stations are grouped within the same town because I can't overlap my times.

The second scenario is a problem when I am doing a long serial route that may encompass 12 or more shops, 200-300 miles roundtrip or day and night shops together. By the time I get home, I am too tired to debrief the shops so I wait until the next morning after I've gotten a good night's sleep.

One tip on taking photos that I have learned over the years. If you find an infraction, don't immediately take a picture of it. Wait until you've walked around the forecourt area to see if there are any other instances of the same infraction and then take photos of the two worst examples of it. When I first started doing gas station audits, I'd sometimes have four or five examples of the same infraction and the editors would get on my case for submitting too many instances of the same item. On the required photos, I try to get two photos of the item from two different angles to be on the safe side in case there is a glare or blur issue. For example, I take a photo of each side of the price sign, the canopy, the store and overall photos and at least two photos of different dispensers. Having more angles can help me when the editors have a question about one of my items or if they need pump numbers or other pertinent information.