[consulting] Billing Increments

[Fred Jones]

I had a discussion with the author of Hamster [0], the time tracking
tool I use about time increments. His tool tracks by minutes, rounding
to the nearest minute when it does monthly totals. I know that some
web dev shops, however, have a minimum increment of 15, 30 or even 60
minutes. I am wondering what other people do.

I, for better or worse (probably worse), end up having a lot of very
small time increments as I answer an email here, make a small fix to a
site there, add a page for a different client etc. I have always just
billed what the Hamster says, but I am wondering now if I should make
a minimal increment. I definitely lose a bit of time switching
projects. Sometimes it's really just a second or two but other times
it's a lot more than that. I was thinking to make a minimum of 15 min.
per day. Then if I do 2 or 3 little tasks for a client, each taking
only 2 minutes, I would bill them for 15 min. for that day. We can
code a script to do this calculation automatically based on Hamster's
SQLite file.

Interesting to hear what people have to say on this subject of time and billing.

Thanks,
Fred

[0] http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/