The good: It is another beautiful day in paradise. A balmy 80 degrees at 9:18 am.
The bad: I have a lot to do, but no motivation to do any of it. Including billing my clients for work done over the last 2 months. To do the billing I have to sort through 6 dozen emails and pull out the relevant data.
The ugly: The client whose billing I need to sort out is a non-profit and the work I have done is being billed at substantially less than my usual hourly rate. At this point, it is almost not worth billing the client because it would take a few hours and I wouldn’t get paid for it.
Isn’t there some way you could keep track as you go rather than go back through 6 dozen emails? Or is that a dumb question?
And I have decided you really do live in paradise. I wasn’t convinced before, but it seems to be quite beautiful there.
Well, most of my clients are 3 invoice jobs. I just get the contract, I send the estimate, they sign the contract, I bill in three invoices (Start, Mid-point, Completion). With this client, its an ongoing maintenance contract so they accrue charges everytime they ask me to do something. They send me emails three, sometimes four times a day asking me to change this little thing, or that little thing. They are not my only client… they are not even a priority client, so sometimes I just do whatever it is they want to get them off my back so i can do real work that gets real billing.
So, long story sort of short, I could simply keep track as it happens, but its a pain in the ass to drop what i am doing, open up my billing software, add an item, fill in the form, yada yada yada. Ultimately, I make more work by not doing it as it happens.