[alinajaf]

I bill weekly. Clients can book time in increments of one week. Each week costs a fixed amount, though I give clients a 10% discount for pre-payment in full, cleared in my bank account before work starts.

Snarky but true: implementing this was roughly as hard as reading a comment by tptacek about billing weekly, deciding that I bill weekly, and then telling all existing clients and future clients that I now bill weekly.

[pjungwir]

Question from a per-hour freelancer:

Does this mean you only work on one project at a time? I seem to maximize my billable time by doing one project at 20 hours/week plus a few long-term relationships with smaller ad hoc projects. Sometimes the "big" projects overlap briefly but I try to avoid that.

If I moved to weekly billing, I'm afraid I'd need a longer sales process and I'd have to turn down a lot of work that I can slip in with my current approach. So I'm curious: do you work one engagement at a time, and what is your time between engagements?

[tptacek]

You can bill daily and still rotate through work for 3 different clients at a time. You don't even need to make special arrangements to do it. Just do it in the background, get your work done competently for all your clients, and be honest. You'll be fine.

The only thing we're telling you not to do is to break your bills out by the hour. A whole lot of bad stuff happens when you start billing in sub-day increments.

[danenania]

How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms?

How precisely do you specify upfront what a 'day' means? Are you just keeping it vague and not working with anyone who takes issue with that? Or are you specifying it as 6 hours so you have time to handle other things?

I recently attempted a move to daily billing but had a client who was anal about 1 day = 8 hours and this caused significant friction/lack of flexibility. The client was a somewhat difficult/overly-controlling person but willing to pay well for quality. Would you simply turn down someone like this?

[tptacek]

I think a bit of intuition you might need here is that the delivery date for a project and its fee structure are not the same thing. You carefully negotiate delivery dates. You do not carefully negotiate the definition of a day. You will find, when you do this, that most reasonable delivery dates are just fine with most clients, even if they account for more weekdays than you're billing for.

I think that with all sane clients, you will also find that once the delivery date is negotiated to both sides satisfaction, nobody gives a shit about what happens in the intervening days. Good clients are happy to know that they're going to get something on a specific date. They are thrilled to have a black box that they can put money into and get value out of. Don't open up the black box and explain it. They don't need to know how the fuel injectors work, and if you explain electronic fuel injection to them, some of them will just get neurotic about whether it's functioning correctly.

[Silhouette]

How precisely do you specify upfront what a 'day' means?

I don't. All my recent contracts of this nature have simply stated that a day on which any services are provided is chargeable, or words roughly equivalent to that.

This does require a client to trust that I won't abuse the deal by, say, charging for a day off just because I spent a few minutes replying to an e-mail. I suppose legally speaking I could do that, but then legally speaking a client can typically also fire me in the time it takes to get a letter delivered if they're not happy with progress on their project. As with so much of this business, trust goes both ways.

In reality, I have never found this to be a problem. As others have said, clients are typically more interested in the value of the work you produce than in how, when, or where you produce it. You might see the occasional raised eyebrow if someone asks directly and is surprised at your answer, but personally I'm not aware that I've ever lost business or left unhappy clients over it.

The client was a somewhat difficult/overly-controlling person but willing to pay well for quality. Would you simply turn down someone like this?

Given a reasonable alternative, which is usually the case: yes.

Incidentally, in the UK, where I am, you should be very wary of taking on "overly controlling clients". If you aren't sufficiently independent -- as demonstrated by signals like your clients controlling your working hours -- then you could be deemed a disguised employee rather than a separate business. That leaves you with all the overheads of running a business, yet also leaves both you and your client with all the tax obligations of an employer-employee relationship, which is a Very Bad Idea.

[percept]

I'm not sure of the current state of things, but that last bit has traditionally been true in the US as well: if you spend all your time with one client, and they control your hours and/or work location and equipment, then you may be considered an employee for tax purposes (IRS Form SS-8 covers this).

[tptacek]

In the US, that works to the benefit of the contractor; the problem is that clients know that, so if you look like someone the IRS might classify as a full-timer (an unincorporated sole practitioner), they may preemptively withhold taxes for you.

This is a problem a couple friends of mine have had. It seems like incorporation, which is cheap and something you should do anyways, mostly fixes it.

[sarciszewski]

"How do you deal with the expectation that 1 day means 8 hours exactly and clients who think in those terms?"

I suppose this only matters if the clients vocalize this assumption?

[alinajaf]

I'm usually working with one client at a time, but as you surmised spend considerable effort keeping the sales pipeline bubbling. Haven't had any time without work for the past couple of years unless I wanted it.*

I should probably point out that "maximising my billable time" isn't really an important goal for me as a freelancer, so we're likely talking about a different business model. You'll hear this a lot from patio11 and tptacek, but overwhelmingly, my goal is to provide as much business value to my clients as possible and charge accordingly.

You don't necessarily have to position yourself as a content marketing/CRO/Security/Sandwich-making consultant to do this, just find a way to make or save your clients buckets of cash and you can charge them whatever you want.

*: That makes me sound like some sort of rockstar freelancer, but in reality I'm a boringly average Rails developer. I get and keep clients by working really hard on sales and treating existing, long-term clients like my family's financial security depends on them (hint: it does!).

[thecodemonkey]

This is very interesting. How do you handle working with multiple clients? E.g. I'm working on this project for this client, this week but the client from last week has an urgent question/issue that I need to look at. Would that be billed hourly, or as part of next week or something to that extend?

[alinajaf]

For work that actually requires me to crack open a terminal, it's as you described i.e. in the vast majority of cases it can probably wait until the next week they've booked. In the rare case that they're losing money thanks to inaction or if the problem is directly due to an error I made, then I'll fix the thing so that it's in a working state right now and work on a longer-term solution in their next slot.