Valley PR Blog

Invoices and tracking hours

By Charlotte Risch on January 29th, 2007 In Advice

It seems as though the lowest paying clients are sometimes the highest maintenance. I spend more time listening to them vent or brainstorm ideas that aren’t always directly related to my PR services than I should and feel as though they really need to see how much this takes up of their time each month.

I am looking for tips and info on how you invoice your client hours. Are all calls, emails, travel time to meet a client for an interview, etc part of hours charged? How do you compare what you do, to, say, a lawyer and the way they charge per hour?

Comments

Any client contact is generally charged against retainer/billed at your hourly rate (email, phone, in-person) although how anal you get is at your discretion.

Most companies I’ve been with don’t bill travel time to the client but all have billed mileage as an expense.

You can bill some standard reimbursible expenses (clipping, long distance, mileage, etc.) to your clients or at the very least, have a discussion with your accountant about what should be billed to clients vs. what you eat and take as a company write-off.

If you don’t already, you’d be wise to track your hours by the quarter hour. (One minute spent with a client is counted as 15, by the way). If you have QuickBooks, there is a Time Tracking option where you can enter data or create weekly worksheets, create invoices off it, etc. It is under the Activities pull-down menu and very efficient. Alternatively, you can keep a daily log by hand, in a spreadsheet — whatever’s comfortable and gets the job done.

By tracking hours (weekly or bi-weekly), you can maximize your profitability or, if you’re over hours, it sets up a dialogue with your client. For example, if you have a $2,000/month retainer client at a $100 per hour rate, that’s 20 hours per month you have give. A situation where you’re already at 18 hours mid-month, clearly merits a discussion.

Hope this helps.

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