I have a bidness problem with electronic media: because of its gestalt and instantaneous nature, it tends to blitz you with tiny jobs that, one by one, take little time but that taken together add up to a lot of billable hours.
Take e-mail, for example.
Shooting off a short e-mail takes less than five minutes. Do you bill for a two-minute squib? Gathering the facts for that e-mail may take more time; if it takes five minutes to collect information for a message that requires two minutes to write, do you bill for five minutes or do you bill for ten minutes? (One normally bills in increments: five, ten, fifteen minutes…any part of that increment means billing for that increment.)
This weekend in a moment of idleness I added up all the time involved in writing messages residing in the “sent” folder that went to one of my clients. A few of them were fairly complex and took ten or fifteen minutes to write. But twenty-five of them were things that took at most five minutes apiece to shoot off.
Five minutes times 25 e-mails comes to two hours’ worth of my time.
If I don’t bill for every one of those teeny little squibs, I lose money — at $60 an hour, that’s a hit. But there’s something about charging a client for an activity so ephemeral that seems…I don’t know. Beyond the pale.
Asked a friend and long-time mentor about the ethics of this.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this question!” squawked she. “Weren’t you married to a lawyer? You bill the sob for every minute of your time.”
You heard about the lawyer who dies and ascends to the gates of Heaven?
“There must be some mistake,” he says. “Why are you taking me now? I’m only 45.”
And St. Peter replies, “According to your billable hours you’re 82.”
What say you, readers? Do you (or would you, if you were self-employed) bill for every minute of your time, no matter how fleeting the task?
I’m with the mentor….Some time ago when I was selling RE I did a lot of work with a lawyer who over time became a trusted friend. I will never forget him sitting at his desk with a chart at his side broken down into the name of the client, what type of work was done, how long the work/phone call took with date and time beginning and end and that this was broke down into 1/10th of an hour or 6 minute segments. This may just work for you….but will tell you some folks may take offense. He was a thorough guy and a good attorney. …though I never got a bill…
LOL! When I was a young thang, my first full-time job was as a receptionist from a law firm (whence the corporate lawyer…). In addition to answering the phones and looking incredibly cute, we also had to file time slips.
(In those days, humans answered the phones, and machines did not keep track of much of anything.)
The firm tracked time in 1/4 hour increments. So, say you did 5 minutes of work on Joe client’s job: you charged for 15. Similarly, if you did 13 minutes of work: one quarter-hour of werk.
As I recall, most of the lawyers would accrue minutes, rather than trying to soak the client for 5 minutes’ worth.
If you bill based on periods, to me you add up those small amounts and if they total up over your smallest increment of billing (a quarter hour?) than you certainly should bill for that time. I don’t know that I would bill for each line item, but in the case you mentioned, would a 2.0 hour line item encompassing all of the miscellaneous tasks be within reason? I would certainly think so. What you’ll probably find is that some clients won’t even question it, some will ask and pay, and you might have some that balk, in which case maybe you back off on those. In any case, you’ll probably recover around 50-75% of your time that you’re not getting anything for today at the very minimum.
Yeah: I’m thinking add up all the mini-charges for a single task (87 gerjillion e-mails to Jane Client) and then bill for the total. It’s crazy to itemize all those things.
I’m really bad about thinking, “Oh, this will only take a minute, so I won’t bill for it.” The problem is that I think that dozens of times per day.
I’ve started tracking all my time – I bought software, I entered all my clients’ names, and I start the clock every single time I’m working. Not only does it keep me focused, but it helps me see how much time different projects really involve (down to the 2-minute emails or 20-second site checks). That helps me adjust my by-the-project rates to be more realistic, and for hourly clients I usually round up or down depending on how much I enjoy working with them overall. I wouldn’t add an extra hour if someone was over by 5 minutes, but it’s very eye-opening to see how much time I spend versus what I’ve been charging.
just my 2 cents. I would record every minute and then bill when it gets to 1/4 hour.
Yup. This is along the lines of what I’m thinking. But it still probably would be good to keep a record, in case the client, reasonably enough, says “huh??? You spent a quarter of an hour dorking with an e-mail message?”
During Mr. PoP’s brief stint at self employment he did not bill for every little thing, and I’m pretty sure that was a large part of why it was a “brief stint”. He would drive out to clients’ homes more than once and charge them $50 for rebuilding their whole computer. Mind you, there were a couple of people that it cost about $10 in gas to get to! So two trips there and back… $40 in gas. So he pocketed $10 cash. Not sustainable long term… though he did really enjoy it at the time!
Comping jobs lends to the brevity of one’s experience, eh?
I’ve been comping meetings wherein most of what we did was socialize. If the person drives in to town to meet me, sure…but if you have to drive to the other side if Hell’s Half Acre…not so much.
One thing I did learn from a long-ago mentor (this was a woman who wore on her back more than my entire net worth…): that it is GOOD to be able to show a client that you’ve given X or Y service gratis. But, obviously, one must exercise some restraint.
On the engineering side of our company, my team’s time gets billed out to projects. At week’s end, it’s easier to look back at emails and meetings and activity, and round up to a whole hour. With over a hundred open projects at any one time, tracking 15-minute slices quickly leads to diminishing returns.
The billing seems like the option you can go with, but just an alternative (off the top of my head since thank the good lord I am out of the billable hours world):
– Why not start with a down payment of sorts for these things? So when you get a client its $60 an hour (you mentioned that in the post), but you take a $100, $250, $500 retainer of sorts that are used for that billable email time?
Since they already paid for it the client doesn’t even think twice in terms of oh she charged me for responding to a 2 second email.
Again – I have no experience with this since I don’t bill out but just a thought.