[thelist] billing clients

[rudy]

> Do you bill for liaison time?
> That is, phone conversations, slogging through email.

nope, that stuff is free

you'd think, with that rate, clients would be all over me, but no, at the
moment my capacity is, as they say, underutilized

anyhow, about billing...

clients i've had have been unanimously pleased with my bills -- more
accurately, none have been displeased, but i like to think they were all
happy

like joel, i explain up front what's going to happen

the "three w's" as i call them -- "who's gonna do what by when" -- are the
three-legged footstool of project planning, take any leg away and it falls
over

my estimates are actual hours of work, and once i start in, if i anticipate
going over, the client learns of this early and approves it

in several cases i have had to eat some extra time

once, i committed to add a style sheet to a table-layout page, using css
but only for fonts and colours, and that it would work in netscape 4 -- you
guys have all done that, right? -- and of course there were tricks, like
how to apply styles to secondary nav bar links in a nested table, which i
had once mastered back when netscape 4 was the cat's meow, but which i had
since forgotten, so i had to re-learn how to do it over most of a weekend
(but it was too hot to do anything else, so i sorta got into it)...

... and i don't bill for learning

like kevin, i keep a log where i track activity, and i track by the quarter
hour, although a single log entry might be several hours in one line, e.g.
"coded the administration pages, 5.5 hrs"

basically every time you get up from the chair to go out or have a bath or
eat lunch or whatever, log what you just finished doing

rudy