Invoicing

[SteelPE]

I am a sole proprietor. I often have clients who only need less than an hour of work for me to accomplish the task they need completed. Depending on the client, I like to have some sort of minimum invoice (say 2 hours of work minimum). For a repeat client who give me steady work I often bill them for the time it takes to complete a project at my hourly rate. However, I find creating invoices and tracking them takes far longer than the actual task. I don't see invoicing a client for 2 hours when the task was completed in under 1.

For example, just today I had a repeat client ask me to run a quick deflection calculation on a bent plate. I talked to the client, calculated the moment of inertia, calculated the deflection all in about 30 min (it took a little longer than anticipated as I wrote a quick spreadsheet to run the moment of inertia calculation just in case it failed and I needed to change something in the calculation). Tracking this invoice is going to be a pain as it is so small, but these are the types of projects I typically get from this client.

What do others do in this instance?

 

[SteelPE]

Well, I am sticking with the somewhat minimum charge or 2 hours for new clients and no less than 1 with existing clients.

The original client that generated the OP is not killing me on the smallest of projects. He wants me to prove something will work when I told him it won't no matter how hard we try. Been through 4 iterations already. To his defense he is dealing with an EOR who is sticking to a code interpretation and is correct.... but there is no way to make the correct code interpretation work.

Recently I have been sucked into a YouTube series called "Pure Living for Life" or something like that. A man and a woman are trying to build a debt free home in the middle of nowhere. I think they have been working on this project for 2 years. This ongoing project/series specifically highlights the issues with the invoicing practices indicated above. They are constantly calling their engineer as asking questions a qualified GC would be able to answer on his own. I can only image two outcomes:

1) The engineer wants to reach through he phone and strangle those two.
2) The invoice for the engineering is going to be huge.