Are you salary or hourly?

If you are salary, how well to you keep track of billable time to jobs?

Do you bill 8 hours for the day, or do you wittle it down to minute tasks?

both i guess. Salary but we only work 37.5hrs a week, anymore more is comp or overtime. We have to track the 7.5 each day to min 15 intervals.

Salary, but I'm government so I don't have billable hours to track.

Back when I worked as a consultant, I would tend to round to the nearest hour. If I was working on one project all day, but had to field a phone call or a couple emails on another, I would typically just bill my time to the all-day project. If the phone calls & emails approached an hour's worth of time, I would bill for it.

So when you bill your time at the end of the day (or week depending on how it works), do you have unaccounted hours that you put in, or omit them and consider them a gift to the boss? For example, I came in this morning at 7:45 and I will leave at 5, but I will only bill 8 hours in the time-management software. Billing portions down to 15-minutes if needed for specific jobs.

Excluding lunch, I need to take breaks every now and then. I find it impossible to work 8 hours straight, I will take a 5 minute "surf the internet" break or go walk around and see what is going on with other people a few times throughout the day. These breaks can add up throughout the week and I make it up by staying longer than 8 hours (within reason). Again, I know I am not the only who runs this way - still new to the working world (2.5 years) and trying to make sure I am not being unreasonable here.

Salaried. We bill in 15 minute blocks to the projects we work on. Any OT gets counted & reimbursed during the Yearly bonuses. All the hours go into a "pot" and if you work less than 40 for the week, you take from the pot, if you work more, you fill the pot. Have to work 1 hr a day minimum to get counted for the full 8, otherwise it becomes a vacation day.

I put all the hours I work into the timecard software (deltek); even if it is over the 8 hour work day. This is because it is utilized for billing. There are times where I have not accounted for all the hours I've worked; but it's rare. I do get up a couple times during the day to walk around and get away from the computer. I'm allowed a 1/2 hr for these types of activities during the day and get an hour for lunch. Sometimes this goes longer and I just make it up at a later time, or have it taken from the "pot".

When I worked for someone I was always salary, but I kept my hours by the 1/4 hour. One of my coworkers used to call filling out timesheets 'creative writing', because it is truly difficult to be sure of each 1/4 hour. I try to be conservative, but you cannot give your billable time away.

Now that I work for myself, I try to bill my clients based on a 'fixed' fee. I would rather not argue with a client over 1/4 hours. Instead, I prefer to agree on a price up front and do the work. Of course this is nice until the scope creep kicks in...

Salary, 1/4 hours, straight time OT. Not too meticulous about what gets charged where, because much of what we do is split between projects as corporate level functions. Aside from reviews for specific vendors, a lot gets split 4 ways. We take quite a few breaks throughout the day, but we are a very small group, and a lot of what our day is comprised of is interpretation of various Code requirements, so most of our breaks are work-based discussions.

Salary. We round our billable time to the nearest half hour.

Salaried, and unlike most consultants, we don't do time sheets and charge lump sums for our services.

Salaried. We billed to the 1/10th of a hour (mainly because we found phone calls were getting very expensive; similar to attorneys who charge for text messages).

A lot of places are going to competitive lump sum bidding, but we still charged our time accordingly to track productivity and develop a cost curve for the company during bidding.

aadams22 said:

I'm salary and also a government employee. Billable hours really don't come into play. We do have to fill out time cards, but we have so many pay codes there is always something to charge the time to.

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That is one thing I never miss from the private side...fighting with PM's for codes to charge time to. They want you to do the work but god forbid you actually put the time for it on your time sheet. Over here our time sheets are ridiculously easy, everything is either MILCON or leave.