> Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.
That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.
A minimum billable increment is not double billing when properly outlined in a contract. If one item is an hour and two minutes and is interrupted by a three minute item, the bill comes out to 65 minutes of work and 25 minutes of contractually obligated rounding. Anything that had to be item had to be rounded up to the minimum and that's the price the client had to pay for itemization. I wasn't going to play guessing games about which calls counted as an item and which ones didn't.
There’s a lot of grey area and nobody can prove it either way. If you maintain good relationships with your clients and keep them happy, they don’t ask questions.
Consulting is a relationship business. You’ll make way more money focusing on the people rather than the work. You can cover up sloppy execution with a good relationship, but stellar execution won’t save a project where you fuck up the client relationship.
I’m very fair with how I bill my clients, and I do bill distinct tasks on separate timers. This means I’ll sometimes have a dangling 5min to be attached later to a 15min increment when I resume it. But yes, if my task is interrupted for another billable thing, that is a new clock that’s started, because it’s another task that’s tracked separately.
That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.