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I'm a developer by trade, but the nickel and diming of time tracking is something I'm well familiar with. A few thoughts: 1) If you can, give a fixed-fee model a chance. Since your deliverables currently are, "We meet on Skype for a discussion about your needs and possible solutions," you could very easily charge a set rate for each meeting and just make sure you set a hard timebox on it. Set a pair of timers, one at 15 minutes to remind you and them that there's only 15 minutes left on this consult, and one when the time slot is over. Stick to your guns as if you have another appointment afterwards (and you should have one in that slot; that appointment is for compiling your deliverables for sending off). 2) Getting paid is a pain everyone experiences, freelancer and traditional business alike. A good way to deal with that is to require payment up-front. A fixed-fee model is perfect for this, but you can do it with hourly billing models as well. If your consults are always at least half an hour long, require a minimum up-front payment for that half-hour. Or have it be for a full hour, just to cover yourself. This also gets rid of the tire-kickers who just want your knowledge without actually wanting to pay you. Forcing them to put money on the table up-front, even if it's not the full amount, leaves you with the serious clients only. 3) For invoicing and time tracking, I recommend Harpoon (https://harpoonapp.com/). For your purposes, you'd use the time tracking functionality during your consultations, and then create an invoice for that time and send it off. Click start on the timer at the beginning of the call, click stop when you've ended the call, create invoice, add time entry, send to client (via email through Harpoon). You can even integrate it with Stripe for online payment collection, which reduces their barriers to paying you. It also has automatic reminders sent to the clients for unpaid invoices. I'd be happy to discuss more on your specific needs. My email is in my profile. Cheers! |
Quick replies to your pointers 1) not all calls are of the same length Some calls need just 5 mins to explain a complex idea and some calls need 1 hour to explain something simple! Fixed pricing breaks here.. the opposite party will be like why am I being billed for one whole hour when only consumed 5 mins of your time ?!
2) upfront sounds great ! I’ll try that .. but most of the times people get sold into paying for consultation only after the initial consultations fetches them some value. Tire kickers are anyway not gonna come back .. so they aren’t of concern either way!
What do you think of an idealist setup of the following fashion: - conversation starts for free - client can see value and decides to pay - by the end of the call client gets an invoice automatically with the consumed minutes of consultation
Ofcourse this is an ideal scenario but I think that would take care of my problems Is this something that makes sense ?