[consulting] Billing Increments

[Eric Tucker]

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. 

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. 

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). 

Eric 

-- 
Eric Tucker 
Semperex, LLC 
eric at semperex.com 
Austin & Houston, Texas 
blog: http://blog.erictucker.com/ 

On 1/10/10 7:13 AM, "Fred Jones" <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote: 

> 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/ 
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