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Billing
Hello,
For the first time ever, I put together and uploaded a 30 minute television show to a station server for a client. The required file was over 10GB in size and took forever to upload to the FTP site. I was able to do other work while it was uploading, but should I bill for the entire time the file took to upload? What is standard practice here?
Best,
Aaron Cadieux
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2 Replies
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If you were able to do other work, then no. And I don’t think normal policy would detail a line-item expense for the upload time… if it’s costing you money for that upload, you just build it into your rate, instead of breaking it out as a line item.
I’m of the persuasion that you bill -something- for machine time, if the client’s job is tying it up and preventing it from being used for other billable work. If it’s not in conflict with another job, then the charge would be nothing, or more to the point, not “nothing”, but already built into the calculations you used to create your hourly and day rate in the first place. Machine usage, wear, upkeep and replacement budgeting are all baked into your calculations when first creating your rate. Or they should be. Does that make sense?
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I often include a line item of “data management” . I include the time to backup files, encode and upload. If it’s unsupervised overnight kind of stuff, I usually just charge $25 per hour.
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