Status: LIVE

Billables vs Non-Billables

💰 Billable

• Engineering, Design, QA, etc. time

• Code reviews, design reviews

• Testing, regardless of whether it's done by an Eng or a PM

• Planning meetings, bill for all active project members (see below)

• Retrospectives, bill for all active project members

• Discussions with client whether we do it this way or that way

• Speccing by PMs

• PMs talking to the customer over the phone

• Travel time. Billable by default, but should be clearly communicated to customers ahead of time

• Onboarding time onto a new project is typically billable. However it's possible that special commercial incentives are given to customers for such cases--discuss these with CRO and HoP.

• Project kickoff, bill for all active project members

• Calls with the customer to answer questions, give support, give advice, etc. Same for email.

❌ Non-billable

• Conversations with the customer regarding new potential future work. The criterion here is: "Are we discussing some project or large set of scope for which we haven't got the green light yet? Typically this will be a new project for an existing customer, or a new work package for an existing project". There's work packages, and then there's work packages–if the project is generally handled like a long string of small work packages, then discussions around new ones should be billed because this is approximately equivalent to agile scope planning. On the other hand, if the customer gives us the green light to build v1, and then he wants to discuss a potential v2 which is something for the future, and they're not yet sure whether they want to do it and are in the process of figuring out what it would cost or how long it could take, then this has a predominately "sales'y character" on our part and should not be billed.

• Having a friendly relationship with a customer. If a customer tells us a story about his summer holidays or whatever, we won't bill him for that.

• Anything that benefits primarily us. e.g. asking the customer for permission to use their project as a reference, or asking the customer for an introduction to someone, or asking them what that tool was they used

• Meetings or calls that can be categorised as "complaints" by the customer

• When the customer reaches out to us to do something nice for us, e.g. call us to give us praise, or invites us out for dinner.

• Onboarding time onto a new project, when it's our fault, e.g. when we swap a developer mid-project.

• On projects where a team member is working 100% for a single customer: don't bill holidays, sick leaves, summits, internal 9Y events, etc.

• Writing an invoice to a customer, or preparing a worklog report

• Project debrief (regardless of whether it's internal only, or including the customer)

• Periodic checkins by the account executive/key account manager/CRO to check whether things are all good

Notes

• Active project member: Someone who is actively working on the project and typically includes: Eng, Des, PM, AL and/or TL. This excludes people who might be sitting in to help out or give advice on a one-off or emergency basis such as HoP,CRO, CTO. If someone is helping out on the project and doing the same type of work as one of the active project members, for example the CTO writes a bit of code, or the HoD polishes the designs, then this is billable.

• Sometimes a meeting or call has a mixed character, where a part is billable and part is not. In those cases, treat the whole thing according to the overwhelming character of the meeting. For example if it was 45 minutes non-billable, and 15 minutes billable, then track the whole thing as not-billable; and the same the other way round. Only do this "swallowing" up to a max of 30 minutes--in other words if it was 2 hours billable, and 45 minutes non-billable, then split up the worklog into two.