[consulting] Billing Increments

[Christian Pearce]

This is a good discussion.  My thoughts.

I moved to 6 minute increments.  I include the time it takes to track and
record time in RT.  We have custom scripts that generate invoice information
for our accounting software.  We use GnuCASH but are moving to Compiere.  We
have custom fields to track sales person, rates, etc.

Dealing with small tasks are annoying to anyone.  I typically don't charge
for really, really small stuff like sending a quick email to answer a
question, etc.  I handle it two ways, one I try to get the customer to
prepay a certain amount of hours for maintenance type work.  The amount
depends on the need.  This helps with all the billing annoyances.  Once the
hours are used up we bill more.  If it is project work we do it separately.
If they don't prepay, I am just not as responsive to small requests.  My
clients understand if they want priority they need to prepay.  I tell them
to send a ticket to my support queue in RT.  Then I follow up with all of
them through out the week as my time dictates.

One thing I found is a lot of these requests/tasks aren't necessary and in
some cases are never carried out.  The problem is the barriers to entry to
communication are real low.  People are two quick to email.  So that is how
i deal with the interruption factor.  The better the client the better my
reaction.  So if a client doesn't cry wolf to often I will usually help them
on the spot.  If it is an emergency I will help them.  Otherwise they are
more than happy to wait.

Note: Another way to deal with interuptions is to not check your email all
the time.  Do it like three times a day.  I found
http://inboxzero.com/inboxzero/ and GTD useful.

This isn't a one size fits all.  I use to do 15 minute increments when I
worked for myself.  Now that I joined xforty.com I bill 6 minutes as I
described before.  I use to have a few steady clients that keep me full time
on project work, and could usually work in fifteen minute chunks.  Now I
have a lot of clients that are looking for project and maintenance type of
work.  We do a lot of remote systems administration which also fits this
type of work.

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 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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-- 
Christian
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