Bill It Once
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Every hand that worked today
left a mark somebody's got to weigh
Oh the count is never neat
someone still must claim what love made complete
Send it twice and someone pays for air
let it drop and no one's watching there
Missing money makes no sound
Lord teach us to notice what got lost and never found
Bill it once, bill it right
Give an account for the work in the light
What we did, let it be known
Jesus, You keep the ledger we could not keep on our own
We can chase the numbers all day long
count the messages and call it done
But the total's still not true
till we hold what we gave against what came through
Bill it once, bill it right
Give an account for the work in the light
What we did, let it be known
Jesus, You keep the ledger we could not keep on our own
You see what we did, You see what we did
You see what we did, You see what we did
Every quiet hour, every hidden gift
You see what we did — nothing's ever missed
So we bring the whole of it, nothing left behind
Thank You, Jesus, for the debts You paid in kind
Bill it once, bill it right
The band
Software in the Pews
An unhurried male tenor answered by a whole room singing the hook back. Earnest, communal and plain-spoken - more 'we' than 'I' - building on one simple image and returning to it, hopeful about getting things right together.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post HL7 DFT Messages Explained: Detailed Financial Transactions.
DFT messages carry chargeable activity from clinical systems to financial ones, so health services get paid for what they actually did. Here is how financial transaction messages work and why billing interfaces are unusually unforgiving.