Transparency is the best customer policy
If you are charging your expertise and your time for a living you know how disconcerting it can be for a client to receive their bill. How can they have the assurance that what they are being charged for is value for money? How can they be re-assured that their invoice is a proper account of work actually performed?
The answer is to let them know what is happening. Instead of waiting four weeks to cause them to fall off their chair when they finally get your invoice why not giving them real-time access to your timesheets? Scary thought? Not really. Either you are tweaking the real hours you spent on that job or your hourly rate is too high because you don t want to reveal how long you actually spent on this task.
People simply like to be told the truth and if you spent 10 hours on a job and are only charging 5 that is to be documented. If the senior partner could have done the job in two hours at a top hourly rate but a new graduate staff took twice as long at bottom price it is worth letting the client know.
Some IT providers are so nervous about their charging issues that they send their staff to work on location when they might as well have performed their task remotely from the office with peer review. The idea is that if the client sees our people at their premises they will have some good subliminal feeling that we are really working on their job.
Baloney! Who do you think you are kidding? Trust is lacking here. The best way to clear the air about justifying your time and your rates as a provider is to be pro-active by providing the logs of who did what and where. LogBook is such an online billing application where your clients can see your timesheets. Later they can also see how much time was charged and at what rate. They can see if the project is still under budget or not. You might have agreed that the job will not cost more than x dollars and that any overtime will be borne by you. You might also charge hardware components or software subscriptions as part of your service.
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