[thelist] Billing Increments

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Mon Jan 11 19:06:00 CST 2010


Matt Warden wrote:
> 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!)
I also think it's tough to get down overly specific. If you chart for 
every minute worked then you will need a timecard a mile long. Do you 
check out every time you glance away and check/respond to a non 
job-related email message? Stand up and move your limbs? The time you 
take charting becomes part of the equation. What's the average 
efficiency of the worker bee, perhaps 30-40% time at the job applied to 
the job? I once worked in a steel mill where they had testers who ran 
one test per hour and spent 55 minutes of every hour in the cafeteria. 
Mind-boggling.

Like what Matt said, it's got to be reasonable.




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