Billing ethics?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Lyndsey Amott reports: <<I was recently asked to write a proposal for 
tightening up the text of 12 subdomains for a company's website. Each 
subdomain was approximately 13 pages. It took me a total of 18.5 hours 
to... figure out... [and] write the proposal>>

That's a lot of work, but it sounds like it paid off in that you won 
the job. Creating proposals and estimations are part of the job. In the 
future, if you know you're going to spend considerable time creating 
the proposal, include that time in your estimate of the job--not as a 
line item in the budget, but rather "buried" in the hourly rate. That's 
no more unethical than including your computer and office rental costs 
in your hourly rate for a job.

<<I estimated that it would take me 75 hours to complete the job, and, 
because I really wanted to write for this company, I said that I would 
not charge for any hours over 75...>>

That's reasonable. In effect, you've given them a fixed-price bid, or 
an hourly cost with a billing cap. Both are fairly common ways to bid 
on a job. The trick is to make those 75 hours work for you so that you 
don't end up spending 150 hours--which means, as noted above, that your 
proposal time must be included in the total cost if you want to recover 
that time.

<<The company accepted the proposal, but stated that they would not 
make a final decision until I had completed the text for one 
subdomain.>>

This is also reasonable, but at this point, you're doing work for them 
and should make it clear that you expect to be paid for that work. As 
you note below, they behaved ethically by paying you for this.

<<I submitted a first draft as a .txt file and asked them to comment, 
but they refused, saying that they would prefer not to look at it until 
I had done all the HTML so that they could read the text in a 
browser.>>

Again, that's reasonable. You've been asked to produce a better Web 
site, not just better text, and the only way they'll know you did both 
parts of the job is to see what you've produced. A compromise you may 
like: Provide both the HTML file (think of it as "proofs") and a Word 
file  (so they can edit in Word using revision tracking). Instruct them 
to make changes in Word (faster and easier for them than having to copy 
text out of the browser and comment on it separately) based on their 
reviews of the HTML in a browser.

<<I did as they asked, but when they read the text in the browser, they 
felt that it was not punchy enough and decided to drop the project. 
They've asked me to send them an invoice for the work I did.>>

That's fair, but if you really want the work and you feel that their 
comments are reasonable, make a counterproposal: "Let's work 
together--no charge--to figure out how you'd like me to redo that first 
section. It should only take one more round of revision to produce 
something you're happy with, and after that, I can do all the other 
sections to match. This way, you'll preserve your investment in the 
project. This 'iterative improvement' is part of the investment we both 
make in producing something to be proud of."

<<should I bill for the 18.5 hours I spent on the proposal? Without the 
proposal, I can bill for only 28.5 hours, but with the proposal, the 
total hours would be 47, which might strike the company as rather 
unbelievable in light of the fact that I said I'd do all 12 subdomains 
in 75 hours.>>

As noted above, you can't generally bill for time spent on a proposal. 
Although you could pro-rate this investment of time over your full 
estimated time to complete the job, you would be retroactively padding 
your hourly rate, and if you've already quoted an hourly rate, you 
can't change it at this point. Next time build the proposal hours into 
your total estimate so that the client already expects to pay for it.

Also note that if you estimated 75 hours for 12 sections, that amounts 
to 6 hours per section if the sections are all equal length. Unless the 
trial section you've already submitted is unusually large, it may be 
hard to justify billing more than 4 times the estimated time per 
section.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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