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Comment by tonyvt2005 | Hacker News Reader

tonyvt2005

Just curious since I haven't done freelancing yet... how do you determine what is billable vs. non-billable? If 60% of your time is billable then what constitutes the other 40%? I know part of it is looking for new work. What else?

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It depends on how you bill (hourly vs day vs project) -- but there are many things that are obviously non-billable, because they are not for any client (e.g. doing your taxes/administrative for your business, buying office supplies, and every other little thing that isn't directly tied to the end product you're providing to clients).

Another big time sink (that I didn't realize) is all the work that's involved with even setting up a contract or freelance relationship. Depending on the client, you can spend weeks waiting / working out details before the project begins. This is why longer projects are more valuable (and can be billed at a lower rate) -- since there's always some fixed overhead per project.

In practice this is almost always easy to determine. For any given day, you log the hours against a client that you did something for the client. "Something" doesn't always equal coding - it could be meetings, setting stuff up, responding to e-mails, etc. For any given hour you bill, just ask yourself "If a contractor charged me for this hour of activity, would it make me - as a customer - freak out?" If the answer is yes, don't bill.

Also, I will often not bill some hours for clients that have given me a lot of work over the years.

In addition to what the others mentioned, there's also paperwork (such as my nemesis, filing); the time you spend running to OfficeMax to buy a new chair or a box of paper; the time spent looking for medical insurance (and being aghast at what it costs for an individual); "casual" contacts that sometimes can be transformed into business networking but don't, always; doing your invoicing and bookkeeping (most freelancers I know are terrible at this). And that's just off the top of my head.

I spent years as a sysop of the CompuServe Computer Consultant's forum. I'm kind of familiar with this stuff. <g>

Much of this is obvious. Some of it could go either way though. The obvious stuff is regular business tasks such as billing, marketing, distractions (turn off that IM!) dealing with email and things like that. It all really adds up.

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