Ask HN: Are hours spent dealing with billing, billable?

1 point·rrhyne··4 comments

I have a client who recently refused to pay a very large bill on time and was 60 days late. It took me 3 hours total of emails, phone calls, etc. to get him to arrive at a payment plan.

Then I went and billed him for 1 of those hours. He doesn't want to pay that hour. I did it half to get some pay back on my time, half to stick it to him. Do I have any grounds for this or should I just drop the hour?

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I don't think you should charge him for that hour. You might instead try to charge him interest for being late (or add interest to payment plan).

However, personally, I think it's better to move on and instead spend your time diversifying your customer base. A friend of mine says the nice thing about consulting is "you can fire your customer."

Your friend is right.

You do not say which country (and thus legal jurisdiction) you live in - so that probably means you live and work in the USA.

If you were in the UK then you can't normally recover time spent in persuading your debtors to pay their bills. You can however start to charge interest on the outstanding balance after a reasonable period of time - and after giving due notice.

Perhaps others can contribute answers that relate to other countries.

Thanks for the advice. I've already instituted new terms and have left it for them to decide whether to pay the hour or not.

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