Hourly Billing Rules & Guidelines

We have found it useful with some clients to define some rules for us to follow when doing hourly billable work.  The goal of these guidelines is to minimize surprise bills and charges, because they hurt our clients, and our relationship.

Before deciding which guidelines will work best for you, it is important that you understand review our Rates and Policies,  especially the CNS Hourly Billing Primer.

Most clients don't understand how varied our clients' preferences are on these things, so we've had problems in the past when clients assumed that their preferences were obvious to us.  Some clients just want everything done ASAP, regardless of hours, as soon as an estimate is approved.  Others want us to finish everything with priority 1 that is also marked critical ASAP, but for everything else they want us to stay under certain hours.  You get the idea.

Here are some suggestions we have based on what has worked with other clients. You should review these guidelines with your project manager, and discuss the pros and cons of each option.  Once you have decided which guidelines will work best for you, they will appear to our employees in the upper-right corner of every request page in Tracker, so developers and managers may review them as needed.

Please specify rules to let us know how to proceed when we realize that a request will exceed the estimate.  You may supply 

• Critical Amount.  Specify a specific number of hours, or percentage of estimate, that will trigger one of the following action.  Please provide a number of hours and % over estimate, whichever is greates.  For example:
  "As soon as you realize that the actual time will exceed the estimate by 2 hours, or 25% over, whichever is greater...." 
• Action to Take:
  • Continue Work.  If the estimate will be exceeded by the Critial Amount, we will continue work, but rules governing Maximum Monthly Hours will still apply.
  • Post a Message, and Continue Work.  The developer will post a message when they realize that the estimate will be exceeded by the Critial Amount, but will continue work unless or until you say stop.
  • Stop Work and Request Approval.  The developer will post a message when they realize that the estimate will be exceeded by the Critical Amount.  They will stop work until you tell them to proceed.  You should also specify whether you would also like to receive an email or phone call to give your approval, or whether posting a message in Tracker only is sufficient.

These are the rules that we've found were helpful with various clients in the past.  You may provide a different rule based on the message priorities, or some other combination.

Our developers will do their best to follow your requested rules as closely as possible, but there are many cases where that might be difficult.  In the long term, setting down these guidelines will help us to build a stronger relationship, and should allow you to better control your budget.