| Justin Courts on 4 Feb 2008 14:45:34 -0800 |
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(Disclaimer: I haven't had as much experience freelancing as some of the others who are likely to reply, but hopefully you find my information useful regardless.) I personally take the approach that "time is time" and any time spent working on a project - be it correspondence or writing code - is treated the same. Research is a bit of a gray area for me, though. If I'm researching something the client's requested specifically, like writing code that complies to a specific, non-routine/non-technical standard, I bill them for that time. If it's research on something technical I should really know about anyway, I tend to eat those hours. If you have to look up how to use DBI because it's been awhile, I wouldn't bill for that. If you're required to work under the HIPAA guidelines, I would bill for that research, making sure the client knew I wasn't knowledgeable about the spec. The time you spent on the project plan, for example, I would definitely bill on, as well as all of the phone calls and emails, assuming they were business related (the "client" I've done a fair amount of freelance for lately is the company of a friend of mine, so we could talk for an hour and only discuss work for 10 minutes - I only bill for those 10 minutes, obviously). Also, there have been times where I've misunderstood the specs or read an email the wrong way and have had to redo work. If I feel it was my mistake, I don't bill for the screw-up time. When I estimate a price, I make it clear that the time estimate is a best guess, but the hourly rate doesn't change. I also try to bring up how much time I've spent on the project during status calls and explain when scope creep or spec change occurs that redoing previously completed tasks counts towards the clock, too. As I said at the top, I don't have a ton of freelance work under my belt. I've only had two clients ever complain about my cost - one before work was done and one during (almost completed, really). The first one I didn't take because I could tell it was going to be a hassle, and the second one was resolved when I delivered a detailed list of each task completed with the amount of time worked on each task. It turned out the client underestimated the complexity of some of the tasks he requested, even though I explained in the beginning they were going to eat up a fair amount of time. If you have such a list handy, I recommend itemizing everything you did, including the time spent on those phone calls, emails, writing his project plan, and changing the same code repeatedly. If you don't have such a list, I recommend keeping one for all jobs - it's the one place in my life I'm truly organized! Hope this helps, --Justin On Feb 4, 2008 5:12 PM, Lawrence Miller <ldpm@lawrencemiller.org> wrote: I've got a question for those of you who do or have done freelance work
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