[thelist] Billing Increments

[Matt Warden]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think calculating in increments could get a little silly. Depending
on the kind of work you do, you could end up billing 14 hours for an 8
hour day. I think it's perfectly reasonable to round to the nearest
half hour on a per-day basis (as in, add up the time for today and
round to the nearest half hour, but if you answered two emails at 10
minutes a piece, that is rounded to a total of 30 minutes not 1
hour!).

-- 
Matt Warden
Cincinnati, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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