<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'>We generally bill what we work based on the clock. However, I think for a developer it is justified to bill in increments as large as one hour. Particularly for anything involving coding, it does take the brain a bit of time to go from one thing to another. I would rather have a developer or myself work on something in 2-4 hour blocks or an entire day as opposed to continuously switching gears which I think is bad for productivity.<br><br>Oftentimes I do not track/bill 5 minute tasks or a brief response to an email. How much time should I charge for ruminating at lunch over a design issue? If I spend the whole day on one thing, I'm going to charge somewhere between 8-10 hours and at a higher degree of accuracy than +/- 20 minutes is not necessarily going to be reasonable to capture. Of course I will usually give clients the benefit of the doubt by sometimes slightly adjusting charges downward when invoicing and charging sufficient rates to reflect this kind of accommodation.<br><br>This does get into a related issue. I think clients like to be able to look at an invoice and see things of real value. I tend to make my invoices more detailed than many often including a description of even short, small tasks, zero charge values for unbilled tasks and the names of my subcontractors or others performing the work. I am aware there are schools of thought against this level of detail, but I believe it is good for my client relationships. So, on one of my invoices you might very well see something like "Changed settings for [x], 0:05 (5 minutes)" or even such an entry with 0 minutes or a billing rate of 0. I try to direct the focus to what was accomplished, and the time it took to do that is in some ways incidental (but of course where we make money).<br><br>Eric<br><br>-- <br>Eric Tucker<br>Semperex, LLC<br>eric@semperex.com<br>Austin & Houston, Texas<br>blog: http://blog.erictucker.com/<br><br>On 1/10/10 7:13 AM, "Fred Jones" <fredthejonester@gmail.com> wrote:<br><br>> I had a discussion with the author of Hamster [0], the time tracking<br>> tool I use about time increments. His tool tracks by minutes, rounding<br>> to the nearest minute when it does monthly totals. I know that some<br>> web dev shops, however, have a minimum increment of 15, 30 or even 60<br>> minutes. I am wondering what other people do.<br>> <br>> I, for better or worse (probably worse), end up having a lot of very<br>> small time increments as I answer an email here, make a small fix to a<br>> site there, add a page for a different client etc. I have always just<br>> billed what the Hamster says, but I am wondering now if I should make<br>> a minimal increment. I definitely lose a bit of time switching<br>> projects. Sometimes it's really just a second or two but other times<br>> it's a lot more than that. I was thinking to make a minimum of 15 min.<br>> per day. Then if I do 2 or 3 little tasks for a client, each taking<br>> only 2 minutes, I would bill them for 15 min. for that day. We can<br>> code a script to do this calculation automatically based on Hamster's<br>> SQLite file.<br>> <br>> Interesting to hear what people have to say on this subject of time and<br>> billing.<br>> <br>> Thanks,<br>> Fred<br>> <br>> [0] http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> consulting mailing list<br>> consulting@drupal.org<br>> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting<br><br></div></body></html>