Log Book Timesheet Blog

If you are charging your time or expertise for a living you know how disconcerting it can be for a client to receive their bill. How can they have the assurance that what they are being charged for is value for money? How can they be re-assured that their bill is a truthful account of work actually performed?

The answer is to let them know what is happening. Instead of waiting for the end of the month to cause them to fall off their chair when they finally get your invoice why not giving them real-time access to your timesheets? Scary thought? Not really. Either you are tweaking the real hours you spent on that assignment or your hourly rate is too high because you don't want to admit how long you actually spent on this task.

People simply like to be told the truth and if you spent 10 hours on a job and are only charging 5 that is to be documented. If the senior partner could have done the job in two hours at a high hourly rate but a new graduate staff took twice as long at bottom price it is worth letting the client know.

Some IT providers are so fidgety about their charging issues that they send their employees to work on location when they might as well have performed their task remotely from the office with peer review. The idea is that if the client sees a member of our team at their premises they will have some good subliminal feeling that we are really working on their job.

What a lot of hogwash! Who do you think you are kidding? Trust is lacking here. The best way to clear the air about justifying your time and your rates as a provider is to be pro-active by providing the logs of who did what and where. LogBook is such a web application where your clients can see your timesheets. Later they can also see how much time was charged and at what rate. They can see if the project is still under budget or not. You might have agreed that the project will not cost more than x dollars and that any overtime will be borne by you. You might also charge hardware components or software subscriptions as part of your service.

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