

Ask HN: How to validate billable hours? - axeman

For companies that outsource, how do you validate billable hours and know whether n people are working on your (time and material) project.<p>For e.g. if you have outsourced to a company for 10 developers working full time, how would you know whether 10 developers are working on your project and how would you roughly validate the hours billed?
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SwellJoe
You can't. That's why you shouldn't outsource an hourly project to someone you
don't trust a _lot_.

The federal government (US, though I imagine it's the same everywhere) has
forms and standardized time sheets that their contractors fill out, all
employees on the job sign their timesheets, and there are big penalties for
faking them and getting caught. But, unless you want to spend hours dealing
with the paperwork that your contractor produces, you probably don't want to
go down this path. And, of course, you almost certainly do not have the legal
clout of the federal government, and so even if you "catch" your contractor in
an overage, there's probably not much you can do about it.

I generally get per-job quotes (or at least estimates, with a requirement that
they get my sign off on more than 10%-20% overage), rather than per-hour. For
very large projects this is not possible...but it's probably worth trying to
break the project down into many small deliverables with mostly preset prices.

ODesk allows you to peak over the shoulder of your contractor. But, I can't
even imagine the sort of person that would take a job with that kind of
intrusive requirement. Good contractors are in it for the freedom, rather than
the high pay, and so if you can peek over their shoulder while they work,
you're probably getting a corporate cog at independent contractor rates, which
is not a good deal.

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3pt14159
Get them to use an online time tracking/project management/invoicing
application. I recommend FreshBooks, partially because I work for them and
partially because they have a built in contractor section. If you connect your
RSS reader to the homepage feed it should let you know when people are
submitting hours.

Also, it should be free for you if you just have one project and are only
using contractors. It is true that they could just leave it on for a while,
but if they have to submit notes while they track time, it would be a pretty
big pain in the arse for them to constantly fake things.

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pwim
It doesn't matter if you are paying for a billable hour and getting half-an-
hour or hour or ten hours of actual work. What does matter is that you get
appropriate value for what you are paying. If you work with the outsourced
team in an agile manner and set of frequent deliveries, it should be easy for
you to determine whether or not you are getting enough value for your money.

