[consulting] Billing Increments

[Michael Goldsmith]

I think an hour might be a bit much as an increment.  I had a client
recently call me up and ask why their HTML isn't showing up on the page they
just made.  It was because the filter was set to filtered html and not full
html.  Is it right for me to bill them for a full hour's worth of time to
answer a question that didn't require any thought?  Yeah, if I had to sit
down and actually do something that took a few minutes, maybe.  But I think
that a client would have a hard time justifying paying a bill for a full
hour's worth of time based on asking a single question that I answered while
I was driving to the supermarket.  I didn't even bother billing for that.
Am I just missing out on a lot of billable time here?  

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Joel Farris
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 7:22 PM
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] Billing Increments

I bill in one hour time increments. If you want my attention, you pay for an
hour. If you want me for the day, you pay for all 8 hours (or whatever). It
works really well for invoicing, and it prevents the clients from calling
and/or emailing unless it's really important. :)
-- 
Joel Farris
TransparaTech, Inc
619.717.2805
Skype & Twitter: joelfarris




On Jan 10, 2010, at 4:13 AM, Fred Jones 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.

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