Billing Client for very small change

Question

Searching on Stackoverflow and writing this question has taken more time than the change I just made for my client just now, but I'll ask anyway.

I got an email from a client asking me to remove 2 trade association images from their index page. From the time I received the email, downloaded the page, deleted the lines, and uploaded the file, this probably took me 3 minutes.

Do you charge for this time? How much? Do you log them and then when they reach 15 or 30 minutes, send a bill? What if that takes 3 months to accumulate?

Answer 1

Do you frequently work with this client? If so, you can maybe fold it into the next bill.

If not I think you should either charge them a minimum amount (say one work hour), or just not charge them at all.

Answer 2

Normally you should charge the minimum unit of time you think it's fair to charge.

Back in France (yeah I am French) a normal IT service company would charge 1 hour of work for this.... The client have to be careful not to ask small changes over and over after if it's the first time they do that you can probably let it go.

Answer 3

This reminds me of the old story about a railroad expert who was called in because a brand-new diesel locomotive would not start, no matter what the engineer did. After a short time studying the situation, the expert gave the locomotive a light tap with a hammer. It started right up. When the railroad received the expert's bill for $1,000, they asked him to itemize it. The reply came:

Hitting the locomotive with hammer: $10

Knowing where to hit it: $990

Answer 4

If you are on a "ramp-up" mode with the client and need to accumulate some goodwill, perhaps its best to do it free of charge as a goodwill gesture. (since it took just 3 min of your time). On the flip side, if it is a client that gives you loads of business consistently, you'd want to give away a freebie now and then as well :-)

More seriously, you may need to eventually classify the project itself upfront based on the time/effort/cost it involves. I have worked on some projects which are classified as "Small changes" based on a previously agreed set of criteria involving man-hour/cost. Then it is easy to get the customer to bundle up the verry tiny changes into one bundle and give it to you as a "Small Changes" project.

Answer 5

What are the terms of the maintenance contract (or whatever contract)?

Answer 6

You may be giving away more than you think.

Its interesting that I read your question just after going through my IM, e-mail and phone logs for the purposes of comparing what I do to what I bill. Once again, this month, I've given away almost 20 billable hours in 3 - 5 minute increments.

The culprits:

• Quick chats on the phone
• 'Quick questions' via instant messenger
• Protracted e-mail threads containing meta discussions
• 'Quick three minute' changes

You would be amazed at how quickly these mount up into a tangible deficit when compared to what you actually bill.

What I have done is begin billing only in 15 minute increments. While a quick change only takes a few minutes in practice, it does involve a disruptive process. 15 minutes is enough for me to complete the task, or answer the question .. or reply to the e-mail and then get back to what I was doing.

I'm not saying that you should charge for every little thing, but I'd charge more often than not. This helps your client in the long run, as they (should) start getting a little better at combining changes into longer lists that consume an hour or more.

Interestingly, my biggest culprit turned out to be instant messages. Skype is an evil, evil little box when it comes to that.

Answer 7

I am currently a project manager; however I started out as a FORTRAN and Clipper developer, and ran my own business. Small changes are the bane of our existence.

Let me start with a question. How many small 15 minute changes can you perform in a day? Interestingly if you pay attention to your day it will not be 32 per 8 hr day. It will be more like 8! And you, like me, will sit there and wonder where the other 6 hours went. Like me, a typical software developer only thinks in terms of coding time.

Enter the software development life cycle. In reality, there are lead in tasks before development, there are completion tasks after development and there are perpetual tasks that start at the beginning of the project and complete at the end. In all, these other tasks take about three times as long to perform as the actual software development bit. These other tasks are Requirements, Analysis, Design, Testing (U,I,S,A), Management and some QA.

Even as a one man outfit you will perform all of these things in addition to the actual code change. You will most likely have difficulty distinguishing the component parts. It will seem like it is just part of getting the job done. Trust me if you don’t do these things you won’t continue to get much work. Requirements and Acceptance testing are vital customer interfaces but may only be a phone call. Analysis and Design may flow very quickly together with coding as you are intimate with the system and the user experience but, you are still doing it. I bet you never push a change back out without at least viewing the code locally and then again once installed in the customer environment. Full life cycle.

After all this, and in answer to your question, while it seems like the change is quite small you should pay attention to how many of these can be managed in one day. Once you realise the time it really takes you might feel more comfortable billing for an hour minimum and billing more regularly so the customer does not forget about the work. Perception is the only reality, manage it closely.

Answer 8

Its my job to record all time spent doing anything as accurately as possible, its my managers job to bill it.