6 ms·

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if

by pw 12y ago

This looks like a fine product and kudos to its creators, but I hate that products like this encourage bad practices for freelancers/consultants. Basically, if you're charging in way that requires software to track how much clients owe you, you're doing it wrong. Take the advice of tptacek and patio11 and charge by the day or the week, not the hour.

alpeb 12y ago
Got any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"
- eswat 12y ago
  Here’s one from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... And if you don’t mind spending some change, I found the Double Your Freelancing Rate book to be a good read that really got me psyched about getting away from an hourly rate (so in my case it was definitely worth it): http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com
- vellum 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203
eswat 12y ago
Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tadmilbourn 12y ago
  What are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an hourly one?
  - andrewfong 12y ago
    As someone who used to bill in six minute increments, I can tell you that the smaller your billing increment is, the more life sucks. Tracking by the hour (or less) introduces a whole new level of mental overhead. Most people are pretty good at recalling the major items they worked on in a day -- and if they can't, they can usually reconstruct what happened by examining e-mail history, commit logs, work product, etc. It's a lot harder to recall how many hours you spent on something though. Based on personal experience at least, if I'm not actively using a timer or using some kind of software that records what I'm doing in real time, my personal recollection tends to be way off. Even when I am using a timer, I often run into issues like forgetting to turn off the timer when I take a gym or coffee break. There's also all sorts of performance anxiety when it comes to hourly tracking. Not all hours are equal. I'm personally way more productive in the morning than I am right after lunch. But as far as invoicing goes, an hour's an hour. So I can either feel guilty about billing two hours for something that should have taken only one or I can write an hour off, which introduces even more overhead. With daily or weekly billing, a lot of that gets smoothed out.
    - tadmilbourn 12y ago
      Thanks for the context... did you have agreements with your client where you billed them by the day or week? If so, did you still have to "itemize" your day and provide some record of what you did? Did you ever work for multiple clients over the course of a single day? Sorry for the barrage of questions, just trying to better understand the use case and think of potential solutions.
bronson 12y ago
It sounds like you live in an ideal world. I often help different clients in the same day. Website bugfix in the morning, bring up bluetooth in the afternoon. It's hard to say ahead of time how long either task will take. Am I supposed to look over my commits at the end of the week and guess a weekly amount for each client? That sounds awful for everybody. Sometimes you can bill weekly, sometimes you need more granularity. (I use hours.) And, no, I'm not doing it wrong.
- stanmancan 12y ago
  I believe part of the idea is not to take on jobs that are an hour here or there, but to take on work that requires full days or weeks. Your daily/weekly wouldn't change from customer to customer.
  - bronson 12y ago
    Oh, I understand the ideal. I just don't like telling clients, "live with that problem until you've built up a full week of issues for me." If I can take an hour to fix a previous project, and spend the rest of the day on a new project, that makes everyone happy. Except people who think that billing by the hour is 100% wrong I suppose.
prawn 12y ago
Doing it wrong or just doing things a different way? There are thousands and thousands of businesses out there with web site needs that just don't justify day or week rates for their maintenance partners. I might work on 8+ different projects in any given day and receive emails/calls from 20+ clients about tasks needing to be done. It can be brutal but I don't know that it's "doing it wrong". Over time, I could transition to clients that mean I might bill daily/weekly but none of them would be my current clients and these current clients would still need someone to provide that service at a level with finer granularity.

by pw 12y ago

alpeb 12y ago

Got any links to that advice? In my experience I prefer hourly billing, mostly because of the kind of clients I handle.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... Control-F for "Charging Weekly: It Makes Everything Automatically Better"
eswat 12y ago
Here’s one from patio11: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin... And if you don’t mind spending some change, I found the Double Your Freelancing Rate book to be a good read that really got me psyched about getting away from an hourly rate (so in my case it was definitely worth it): http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com
vellum 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203

eswat 12y ago

Yeah, which is a shame for good apps like FreshBooks and probably Tiempo that handle the other heavy lifting like invoicing but don’t play nice with a day/week workflow.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tadmilbourn 12y ago
What are the differences that you see between a day/week workflow and an hourly one?
- andrewfong 12y ago
  As someone who used to bill in six minute increments, I can tell you that the smaller your billing increment is, the more life sucks. Tracking by the hour (or less) introduces a whole new level of mental overhead. Most people are pretty good at recalling the major items they worked on in a day -- and if they can't, they can usually reconstruct what happened by examining e-mail history, commit logs, work product, etc. It's a lot harder to recall how many hours you spent on something though. Based on personal experience at least, if I'm not actively using a timer or using some kind of software that records what I'm doing in real time, my personal recollection tends to be way off. Even when I am using a timer, I often run into issues like forgetting to turn off the timer when I take a gym or coffee break. There's also all sorts of performance anxiety when it comes to hourly tracking. Not all hours are equal. I'm personally way more productive in the morning than I am right after lunch. But as far as invoicing goes, an hour's an hour. So I can either feel guilty about billing two hours for something that should have taken only one or I can write an hour off, which introduces even more overhead. With daily or weekly billing, a lot of that gets smoothed out.
  - tadmilbourn 12y ago
    Thanks for the context... did you have agreements with your client where you billed them by the day or week? If so, did you still have to "itemize" your day and provide some record of what you did? Did you ever work for multiple clients over the course of a single day? Sorry for the barrage of questions, just trying to better understand the use case and think of potential solutions.

bronson 12y ago

It sounds like you live in an ideal world. I often help different clients in the same day. Website bugfix in the morning, bring up bluetooth in the afternoon. It's hard to say ahead of time how long either task will take. Am I supposed to look over my commits at the end of the week and guess a weekly amount for each client? That sounds awful for everybody. Sometimes you can bill weekly, sometimes you need more granularity. (I use hours.) And, no, I'm not doing it wrong.

stanmancan 12y ago
I believe part of the idea is not to take on jobs that are an hour here or there, but to take on work that requires full days or weeks. Your daily/weekly wouldn't change from customer to customer.
- bronson 12y ago
  Oh, I understand the ideal. I just don't like telling clients, "live with that problem until you've built up a full week of issues for me." If I can take an hour to fix a previous project, and spend the rest of the day on a new project, that makes everyone happy. Except people who think that billing by the hour is 100% wrong I suppose.

prawn 12y ago

Doing it wrong or just doing things a different way? There are thousands and thousands of businesses out there with web site needs that just don't justify day or week rates for their maintenance partners. I might work on 8+ different projects in any given day and receive emails/calls from 20+ clients about tasks needing to be done. It can be brutal but I don't know that it's "doing it wrong". Over time, I could transition to clients that mean I might bill daily/weekly but none of them would be my current clients and these current clients would still need someone to provide that service at a level with finer granularity.