Billable vs Non-Billable Activity

When we partner together, we believe in equity. It should be a fair and balanced relationship, where we're fairly compensated for the work we do, and you get great value for money. So we try and apply this principle of fairness to how we charge for our services. This means:

• We don't expect you to pay for our education. At the same time, we're not expected to know everything immediately and sometimes we have to do research or look things up.
• We won't inflate your hours (and we have checks and balances in place to make sure time spent is reasonable) and we don't expect you to try and screw us down on time already spent unless something genuinely seems out of place.
• We'll be as honest and up front about project costs as we can, and let you know anytime we feel there could be a problem. You should equally be up front and honest about budgets or concerns as they arise, not after the fact.
• We'll only charge for work done. And you understand that work done isn't confined to coding, designing, site building etc. Rather, it's better to think in terms of work being done for you or at your request, not specific activities.

That said, and with ground rules explained, let's go over some examples of what counts as billable and unbillable activity.

These are examples of billable activity:

• All time spent carrying out actual productive work on a task or project eg. designing, building or coding.
• Investigating and devising approaches to solve complex requests eg. how to achieve specific functionality either via existing plugins, custom coding or a combination of both.
• Providing updates or explanations of work done. This also includes responding to questions about work at any stage.
• Creating documentation, videos or other training material.
• Attending meetings to discuss tasks or projects.

Whereas we would not bill for these:

• Researching solutions that a reasonably skilled developer would be expected to know.
• Providing estimates on tasks and projects (except where detailed investigation is required in order to provide an estimate).

Similarly, when your dedicated manager is doing work on your behalf, these are things you can expect to be billed for:

• Submitting tasks into our project management platform (ClickUp) on your behalf.
• Creating or updating tasks, or otherwise working in your project management platform.
• Providing updates or explanations of work done directly to you or in your project management platform. This also includes responding to questions about work at any stage.
• Quality checking work done and providing feedback to team members.
• Attending project related meetings with you, your team or your clients at any stage.
• Attending review or update meetings with you or your team.
• Compiling reports for you or on your behalf.

But we won't ever charge for these:

• Initial onboarding meeting(s) with you or your team.
• Reviewing team member estimates and approaches, and making appropriate recommendations or approving on your behalf.
• Breaking down tasks and projects into subtasks in our project management platform for better organisation.
• Assigning, scheduling or checking in with team members in relation to your tasks and projects.
• Providing guidance to team members on how to complete a task or project.