Dear Cd's,
This refers to a problem that our office is facing.
Our office is a consultant's office and our clients sign contracts to pay for work done with all extra work payed on an hourly basis. Our fees are as follows (for extra work)

Principal : $ 350 an hour
Senior Architect : $ 250 an hour
Technologist : $150 an hour. (I fall under this catagory).

We have been doing a project which went on for a year and our Boss was invoicing today. Over the year, the client uses phone, e-mail, fax to get the work done and I normally respond to them by e-mail or fax. The norm in our office is that they bill only what has a transmittal (i.e.) sent by courier or picked up by client.
Today my boss asked me to give all the fax/ e-mail transmittal for the extra work done and I was able to give only 25% of what i actually did. Many times, I am under high pressure and work to get the thing done, send it and then start on the next urgent work. Due to this I have forgotton to collect all the paper required so that the Boss can invoice for the work done. Needless to say , this will affect our bottom line.
I am posting this in order to see if there is any other system that can be used for billing the client. I have seen that there is a method in which all correspondence by e-mail is collected into a permanent database. If CD's can tell me some good method of invoicing the client , I can pass the same information to the client. My boss told me today that he will have a meeting with me so as to devise a way in which i can keep track of all the extra work that i am doing in order to facilitate invoicing.
Tomorrow, I also have to give the e-mail/ fax correspondence that I had for another 2 projects which ran for more than a year. Sometime, I just delete my e-mail correspondence for the fear of cluttering my Inbox.
CD's views are appriciated.

TK A

-----------------------------------------------------------------
I am a Gents and not a Ladies.

Thats why ur boss pays you 28K instead of paying 40K....

Be happy with what u got...

I do not know any technical way but why dont u just maintain a simple monthly spreadsheet with your customers name and dates. Every day at the end of the day just roughly put besides each clinet, no. of hrs spent in the day for that client, that will give you pretty much rough idea of how much to bill, unless you need proofs of what you bill.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by tigercanada
Thats why ur boss pays you 28K instead of paying 40K....
Be happy with what u got...

---

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mumbai Maazi Ladki ...

I would suggest you check with a firm of Lawyers for a system for invoicing of work done. Legal firms have a system where each partner/associate logs in time spent on a file (this would include time spent with the client in meetings, over phone, consulting over emails, time spent for research, etc.). The per hour rates of such partner/associate are determined at the time of contracting with the parties. The out-of-pocket expenses are shown as disbursements and included herein are reimbursement of photocopying expenses, faxes, long distance calls, etc.). There are cases where such out of pocket expenses are agreed in advance (at the time of contracting) as a %age of the contract value.

Hope this helps. Regards.

We also deal with different clients wrt to design and consulting. Our office has deviced a very good policy of maintaining the paper/communciation trails. We have a Project Database in Microsoft Asscess in which we input all the necessary information of project name ,project contacts project design products, project billed hrs, number of print out dwg, pacakges etc and in project comments section i type in the project realted activities like phone calls rcved dwg issued etc with date like for example 2007-07-11:- Emailed dwg to xyz peron or company
2007-07-12:- Got call from xyz he wanted to fax the sketch/detail.

the computer we have been provided is very fast at time i have 5/7 windows open as i do different things or sometimes have to work on different project answer queries of another project. Plot the drawings for another project, bind and ship to clients etc. We are expected to be multitasking and sometimes have to meet strict deadlines. I have also devised a system of maintaing the paper trail that we get in the form of email/fax etc . For email i just copy the email by highlighting the msg in inbox window and selecting copy and pasteing it into respective folder. and i rename this file with date time msg
example
2007-07-12 1635 Typical Section for Approval CN Rail Stage 3, Halton
if i get a fax i scan it and grab that file from network rename it with above format so it has the date and time on it.

I hope havent made it to confusing.
Thanks

I have worked in more than one consulting firm and both the firms had there on softwares to track hours that each employee spend on different aspects of the project. For a smaller firm you could do this easily in a Excel.
For eg. If you had a project XYZ you would divide it into different catergories to which work can be assigned such as Correspondance, Design work , Cad work, Site work, and most imprtantly in ur case overtime etc . Then prefereably on a day to day basis you should assign ur hours to the verious categories. If you can't do it on a day to day basis u should atleast assign it on a weekly basis. This way u can keep tabs of how many hours have been spent on each aspect of the work. This I think is a very common practise adopted in most consulting firms.