The real problem with billing by the hour is that you have an inherent conflict of interest: economically, you want to bill as many hours as you can without losing work from the client. Ethically (and, usually, mentally), you want to get work done at the optimal combination of quality and speed. The usual answer given is "raise your hourly rate then", but that presents other business challenges in terms of getting the contract and justifying it to beancounters squinting over every invoice.<p>I don't know enough about developers and per-hour billing, but in my view, consultants need to move away from this model to more transparent models that directly reflect what they can bring to the client.
My invoices are somewhat less detailed than the "BAD" category. And you know what? It really doesn't matter -- my clients trust me. If they didn't, they wouldn't have hired me in the first place.<p>Know what your clients expect.
Everyone hates timesheets and yet every timesheet app seems to be about more ways to manually enter time. We decided to change that.<p>We've always prided ourselves on better quality timesheets. Some of us would keep a journal during the day, others review emails, commits, tickets at the end. No matter what it sucked and was always a bit like fictional archeology. It sounds right but the bones might have been re-arranged a bit and something is always missing.<p>Commit logs, or task lists are only a small part of the story. Lots of work gets lost in meetings, emails, phone calls and the like. Real work happens across multiple dimensions (no matter where ya go, there y'are) and it's a pain to go find it at the end of the day (or week). The more clients you have the worse this is.<p>We built <a href="http://www.crisply.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.crisply.com</a> to aggregate everything we do into a journal automatically organized by project. We also roll up time when we can. The results are a more accurate (rather than precise) timesheet with rich supporting evidence. You also get great analytics at the time and activity level. Crisply integrates with almost any system. Mention HN if you signup and I'll make sure you get in.
I keep my time in Emacs org-mode files. Each client has a .org file, within the file are project plans. I clock in and out of tasks, and use summary clock tables to create invoices. The clock table lists the task name and total time. Works great for me.
I sell my services by the day. I don't screw around with hours. If I work ten hours, that's fine with me. If I work 6 hours, that's fine too. After all, I'm usually hundreds if not thousands of miles away from my family. If I'm there, all I am doing is working and thinking about you and your problems. If I'm not there, I'm not.<p>I was very happy when I went to the day system. I know guys that worry over coming in five minutes late and spend much time each week creating very detailed reports that nobody cares about. I figure if I'm worrying about five minutes or filling out a TPS, I'm not working on the big problems like you are expecting me to. I'm not working in your best interests. The simple thing is either you trust me or you do not. If you trust me and somehow feel I owe you some time, we'll work it out. If you don't trust me, we shouldn't be working together. We got bigger problems than whether I wasted an hour 18 days ago trying to figure out how to use your help desk services.<p>Admittedly it's much easier to be this way after consulting for many years. If I were a junior or entry-level consultant, or worked for a large shop in one of those fill-the-seat contracts, it'd be a different deal. Thank God I don't do that anymore. Had a gig once where I worked for lawyers and accountants. There was never a week that went by that they didn't have problems and correct me on my project paperwork. As far as I knew, they really liked me. It was just the corporate culture. Damn that was a miserable experience.
assuming there's code involved, you may be able to jog your memory some simply by reviewing the commit logs and commits themselves.<p>It's a hard balance to find - documenting what you're doing with enough detail to help justify your expenses, while at the same time not losing the flow of the moment to actually get stuff done. I can often lose a couple hours of time working on an item - tracking down bugs in other peoples' code is <i>really</i> time consuming, and I'd rather get it right than get it logged, to coin a phrase.
All of this can be made up after the fact. If you want to bill your client a million hours you can. Grow up. Learn. You might spend 20 hours on Google trying to fix an obscure bug. What the hell does your client know to challenge that?<p>More likely is that you spend 20 hours refactoring crappy code that someone thought was good enough and it wasn't. Or they didn't know what on earth they were doing. Total waste of time but it's officially already been billed for.<p>Long and short is your consultants will be charging what they think they can get away with. Whether it be less or more than you log.<p>And utter bullshit like this comes from someone who doesn't actually bill or who hasn't had to ruefully swallow a job where they end up billing far less than they did.<p>My favourite real life 'story' about time billing, a bunch of straight-from-uni 'consultants' billed at £250 p/h for photocopying sheet by sheet. You bill what you can get away with.