[thelist] contract work questions

[Sarah Heffron]

Hello,

I have never done contract work before but I am right now. I have a
completely non-computer job at the moment and I'm getting paid regularly
for that, but I'm also doing computer stuff (web dev and sys admin
stuff) for the same people as contract work. They know I haven't done
this sort of thing before and they'd probably be more than willing to
help me figure out how to do things, but I'd rather find out for myself.

Anyhow, I need to bill them I guess and I don't know how that works.
Everytime I do anything for them I keep track of how long it took and
what I did and then I want to put together an invoice showing what I
spent on what times the hourly rate, etc. I don't know how taxes and
things are involved in this. I did several searches on google with
various terms and I'm really coming up empty handed. If someone could
point me to a good resource I'd really appreciate it.

Also, I'm looking for some sort of program to do invoices with,
preferably for linux, but I can use windows if I really need to.
Something I'm looking for would have me enter the date/time/info for
each task and it will tally up the hours and figure out the grand total
and print out something nice, if such a thing exists. I'd write one
myself but I don't have the time for it right now.

TIA,
Sarah