Speaking of project tracking...

Dumb question: but if you're being paid the same for all of those activities, why would they have different rates?

My next, unrelated thought is: unless these hours are used in the accounting system of your own design, this seems like questions for your accounting team. I've always received advice on how to bill various activities from our accounting team, as they are the ones who have ideas how they want to use the data.

David

By "different rates" I'm assuming you mean you bill them differently. I've seen some where travel is billed at half of engineering, etc. I don't like doing that, but it may also be part of the makeup of our work. I have a lot of in-office design work. If I could spend the whole day in the office and bill, say $1,000, I don't see the point in driving to an out of the way place to do an assessment, spend all day, and drive back, and only bill $700. It doesn't adequately cover the opportunity cost of driving to that site. My time is my time, and it has a certain value that I place on it and I expect to get paid for it.

I bill time by the person, not by the activity. So if I hire on a draftsman by contract for a project, I'll bill their time at a drafting rate. But if I do my own drafting, I charge my full rate (unless the contract puts caps on billing rates - I've only seen that on a couple of government jobs).

In terms of tracking them...sounds like you do a better job than I do. I'm set up to track them, but I'm too sloppy by half in that department.

geesaman.d said:

this seems like questions for your accounting team

Click to expand...

Note the "Structural" tag. It's a pretty small percentage of us (from what I have observed) that work at large companies. Most of us are at small consultancies with an accounting department that amounts to a visit to a CPA once a year, or maybe just logging into TurboTax Business.

Are you a one man band or several / ad hoc people?

Five categories for time sounds about right, but depends on what the percent is for each over the year. once one gets <5 or maybe 10% then time to incorporate it into one of the other ones or whether there is a big difference in charge out rates.

What do you do with the data?
you can end up with data for datas sakes if you're not careful



Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

From my experience, drafting staff are usually paid a lower salary than engineers. I would charge travel hours at my hourly rate, plus vehicle mileage/hourly rate. Administrative duties (not billed to a client) can be tracked as an "at cost" expense.

I've seen several different approaches to tracking expenses. They can all be confusing if you didn't initiate the system.

I'm with phamENG here, I have a set rate for my time, if it's horly you get that rate whether I'm driving to your site, from your site, or doing administrative items related to your project, if I have a drafter working on it, then you get their rate. I'm not going to to devalue myself based on what role I'm performing for a project.

The only time I have given a discount is when they need somebody that charges at a lower rate, but I am the only one available. If the drafting squad is horribly backlogged, and I need to step in to do some drafting, I bill at the drafting rate. It's not the client's fault that staffing shifts need to take place.