> I bill by the hour, not the minute. If I work 10 mins on something and do nothing for the other 50, you are billed an hour.
I deal with a lot of contractors. To be clear: If I asked for a single task that takes 5 minutes and they bill me an hour for it, that's 100% fine in my book. Context switching, recording, billing, etc. aren't free. The difference between a 60-minute bill and a 10-minute bill is nothing. Let's just keep it simple and bill an hour.
But this is only for individual tasks. If someone is working independently on a project with 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 5 minutes a few hours later and billing each as an hour, that's not okay.
Depending on the contractor, we don't really scrutinize line items all that closely. However, once you're dealing with multiple contractors and gathering experience about how long things generally take, you start to notice some contractors are outliers in how many "hours" they claim to get things done. In some cases, if their hourly rate is low enough we may not really care, but when someone hits the combo of billing a high hourly rate and also racking up a lot of hours for relatively simple things with no ability to explain why it took longer than everyone else, it's time to phase out that contractor.
>If someone is working independently on a project with 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 5 minutes a few hours later and billing each as an hour, that's not okay.
Yeah I certainly wasn't advocating that. It's a two way street. Clients tend to understand they're paying for availability as much as anything and contractors understand clients want work done on time and within budget as much as possible. In my experience (having done this for almost 15 years) the best client/contractor relationships are built on respect and trust that both sides are not being taken advantage of. And I've certainly seen my fair share of contractors that try to take advantage of clients or let clients take advantage of them. Both tend to not last long as contractors.
I used to work as a project manager , where we had a large pool of vetted freelancers. You'd select the type of work, specify the price and the system would send a mass email to those- whoever accepts first, gets the job.
Most of our clients were banks or investment funds. The company was providing translation services. So a fund gets to update one word in one of their files and it does happen in 12 different languages. We charge minimum fee per job, so 12 words becomes £360. The fund couldn't care less. However, because it's only one word, a single freelancer( 12 in total, for each language) would only get like £0.12 or so. They would also need to update the translation memory and send us an invoice. Nobody wanted to do it, because of this. So I used to struggle to get these jobs done because time was always very limited. We also had 50% margin per project requirement. So I ended up paying £5 per word, which would end up costing me £60, but it would still leave £300 profit for the company. Just like that I solved my issue, because the freelancers were happy to do it. The vendor management killed it a couple of months before my departure claiming no freelancer should get more than the agreed rate....
As someone that takes longer to do things than most due to ADHD issues, here's what I did:
I knew generally how long something should take. So, I would track my hours for sure, but I would reduce the final hours to be roughly what it should have been.
Everyone was happy this way.
Discounting your hourly rate and taking too long looks really bad. Keeping the rate high and discounting your hours looks normal to great.
I deal with a lot of contractors. To be clear: If I asked for a single task that takes 5 minutes and they bill me an hour for it, that's 100% fine in my book. Context switching, recording, billing, etc. aren't free. The difference between a 60-minute bill and a 10-minute bill is nothing. Let's just keep it simple and bill an hour.
But this is only for individual tasks. If someone is working independently on a project with 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 5 minutes a few hours later and billing each as an hour, that's not okay.
Depending on the contractor, we don't really scrutinize line items all that closely. However, once you're dealing with multiple contractors and gathering experience about how long things generally take, you start to notice some contractors are outliers in how many "hours" they claim to get things done. In some cases, if their hourly rate is low enough we may not really care, but when someone hits the combo of billing a high hourly rate and also racking up a lot of hours for relatively simple things with no ability to explain why it took longer than everyone else, it's time to phase out that contractor.