

Logging consulting hours - The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - rabble
http://anarchogeek.com/2012/02/10/logging-hours-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

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kylemaxwell
The real problem with billing by the hour is that you have an inherent
conflict of interest: economically, you want to bill as many hours as you can
without losing work from the client. Ethically (and, usually, mentally), you
want to get work done at the optimal combination of quality and speed. The
usual answer given is "raise your hourly rate then", but that presents other
business challenges in terms of getting the contract and justifying it to
beancounters squinting over every invoice.

I don't know enough about developers and per-hour billing, but in my view,
consultants need to move away from this model to more transparent models that
directly reflect what they can bring to the client.

~~~
mcantelon
>I don't know enough about developers and per-hour billing, but in my view,
consultants need to move away from this model to more transparent models that
directly reflect what they can bring to the client.

Developers are often being paid to do things they've never done before and, as
such, it's hard to do anything but bill hourly. Offering a fixed rate and
having to eat hours to meet it isn't fun.

~~~
andywood
I've found charging a fixed fee for an agreed upon deliverable to be so
utterly BS-free, that it's worth dealing with the smaller problems. The
clients love it, because it takes a lot of the risk and possibility that they
might be getting shafted out of the equation. I love it because I don't have
to justify how I spend the time.

I've found the best solution on my end is simply to first try to estimate a
little pessimistically, and then to charge enough that I'll feel fine even if
the project takes me a couple days longer than I thought. If a totally
unexpected pitfall appears, a reasonable client will be open to renegotiating.

It's so worth it just to avoid the not-so-goodwill that seems to accompany
hourly billing so often.

~~~
dstorrs
Fixed fee saves you from some issues and throws you square into the middle of
others.

Specifically, it means you now need a far more detailed requirements doc
BEFORE you can start working (safely, anyway), and you need to manage changes
much more carefully because they are coming directly out of your pocket.

Plus, as an hourly guy, I never cared when the customer wasted my time, e.g.
with over-attended phone meetings that take unnecessarily long because
everyone needs to have their say. It didn't matter, because I was paid for it.

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cperciva
My invoices are somewhat less detailed than the "BAD" category. And you know
what? It really doesn't matter -- my clients trust me. If they didn't, they
wouldn't have hired me in the first place.

Know what your clients expect.

~~~
chime
Mine are mostly in the GOOD category but it's really for me, not the client.
Like your clients, my clients trust me. But the benefit of listing the details
is I can later go and analyze how much time I spent/wasted on which feature 6
months ago and give them a better idea on whether it will be better to keep
trying to fix it or rewrite from scratch.

Having detailed info. also helps with knowing who requested/commissioned which
task and when, without having to dig into emails, PM software etc.

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michaelw
Everyone hates timesheets and yet every timesheet app seems to be about more
ways to manually enter time. We decided to change that.

We've always prided ourselves on better quality timesheets. Some of us would
keep a journal during the day, others review emails, commits, tickets at the
end. No matter what it sucked and was always a bit like fictional archeology.
It sounds right but the bones might have been re-arranged a bit and something
is always missing.

Commit logs, or task lists are only a small part of the story. Lots of work
gets lost in meetings, emails, phone calls and the like. Real work happens
across multiple dimensions (no matter where ya go, there y'are) and it's a
pain to go find it at the end of the day (or week). The more clients you have
the worse this is.

We built <http://www.crisply.com> to aggregate everything we do into a journal
automatically organized by project. We also roll up time when we can. The
results are a more accurate (rather than precise) timesheet with rich
supporting evidence. You also get great analytics at the time and activity
level. Crisply integrates with almost any system. Mention HN if you signup and
I'll make sure you get in.

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ams6110
I keep my time in Emacs org-mode files. Each client has a .org file, within
the file are project plans. I clock in and out of tasks, and use summary clock
tables to create invoices. The clock table lists the task name and total time.
Works great for me.

~~~
tonyarkles
That's what I've been doing for the last few months and it's been working
great for me. Clock tables can have specific time periods associated with
them, so you can easily build one that lists all the time for February, for
example.

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DanielBMarkham
I sell my services by the day. I don't screw around with hours. If I work ten
hours, that's fine with me. If I work 6 hours, that's fine too. After all, I'm
usually hundreds if not thousands of miles away from my family. If I'm there,
all I am doing is working and thinking about you and your problems. If I'm not
there, I'm not.

I was very happy when I went to the day system. I know guys that worry over
coming in five minutes late and spend much time each week creating very
detailed reports that nobody cares about. I figure if I'm worrying about five
minutes or filling out a TPS, I'm not working on the big problems like you are
expecting me to. I'm not working in your best interests. The simple thing is
either you trust me or you do not. If you trust me and somehow feel I owe you
some time, we'll work it out. If you don't trust me, we shouldn't be working
together. We got bigger problems than whether I wasted an hour 18 days ago
trying to figure out how to use your help desk services.

Admittedly it's much easier to be this way after consulting for many years. If
I were a junior or entry-level consultant, or worked for a large shop in one
of those fill-the-seat contracts, it'd be a different deal. Thank God I don't
do that anymore. Had a gig once where I worked for lawyers and accountants.
There was never a week that went by that they didn't have problems and correct
me on my project paperwork. As far as I knew, they really liked me. It was
just the corporate culture. Damn that was a miserable experience.

~~~
mgkimsal
Similar here - I've got a 'day rate' for on site visits - they're whole day
(usually multi day) affairs. I have hourly as well, for smaller chunks of
time, and I'm generally doing those from home. ATM I've still got a number of
smaller projects that will never take up a whole day of work at any one time,
so hourly fits those, but I'll probably move toward daily rates for more work
in the future. It generally keeps me more focused and more productive on that
one client's projects than trying to juggle 3-4 things in one day for 1-3
hours at a stretch.

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mgkimsal
assuming there's code involved, you may be able to jog your memory some simply
by reviewing the commit logs and commits themselves.

It's a hard balance to find - documenting what you're doing with enough detail
to help justify your expenses, while at the same time not losing the flow of
the moment to actually get stuff done. I can often lose a couple hours of time
working on an item - tracking down bugs in other peoples' code is _really_
time consuming, and I'd rather get it right than get it logged, to coin a
phrase.

~~~
aantix
I've written a gem that cross references your computer activity auto-logged
with TimeSink ( <http://manytricks.com/timesink/> ) with your git commits, and
generates a line item pdf invoice.

<https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies>

Here's a sample invoice :
[https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/...](https://github.com/aantix/big_bucks_no_whammies/blob/master/sample_report.pdf?raw=true)

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soveran
Are you sure the clients want that? I has never happened to me. Besides, it is
terrible for the developers.

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wenbert
I simply use google docs spreadsheet. Has everything I need and I can
"privately" publish it.

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mattmanser
All of this can be made up after the fact. If you want to bill your client a
million hours you can. Grow up. Learn. You might spend 20 hours on Google
trying to fix an obscure bug. What the hell does your client know to challenge
that?

More likely is that you spend 20 hours refactoring crappy code that someone
thought was good enough and it wasn't. Or they didn't know what on earth they
were doing. Total waste of time but it's officially already been billed for.

Long and short is your consultants will be charging what they think they can
get away with. Whether it be less or more than you log.

And utter bullshit like this comes from someone who doesn't actually bill or
who hasn't had to ruefully swallow a job where they end up billing far less
than they did.

My favourite real life 'story' about time billing, a bunch of straight-from-
uni 'consultants' billed at £250 p/h for photocopying sheet by sheet. You bill
what you can get away with.

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Craiggybear
Bill by the day. Makes no difference. My rates don't vary. A day of my time
(7.5 hrs) no matter what I do always costs the client the same.

