Hacker News Reader

Comment by dejv | Hacker News Reader

I am soon going to be freelancing for 20 years and I must say it is still per client basis. There are projects billed hourly, there are fixed scoped projects and retainers with some time budgets.

I would stay away trying to be super detailed about what you did in small time increments, unless required by customer. Nobody really cares about it, it is much better to say "Feature A development. 30hrs" than "Feature A research 15 mins, Emails 1hr. Rework screen A 4hrs... and so forth in long letter that looks like AWS bill.

I do track my time per project (usually break down to dev and admin category) but give out just half-day or maybe hour increments.

View on HN

>I would stay away trying to be super detailed about what you did in small time increments

Amen to this - in fact, I'd say that if you have a customer asking for this kind of granularity, be wary. My own experience is the more a customer wants to micromanage your time and cost, the more likely they are to become a customer more trouble than they are worth.

That's really interesting advice about avoiding granular time reporting, which I've been doing habitually. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense, and I think I'm going to move away from doing that.

As far as only breaking time down to half days -- I tried billing daily for a while, but it has felt clunky to me because I tend to work a ton some days and comparatively little others. Do you work at a relatively constant rate? If not, how do you decide when to bill a half day vs an hour?

I used to work more randomly when I was starting, but I am now having strict routine with set working hours. That makes it easy to bill by man-days.

Decision is usually by customer, I am trying to go with having man-days as billable unit as much as possible, but it is not battle worth winning every time. At the end what customer want is having clear idea how much is project going cost and trust that quality would be (at least) good enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com