What do you guys prefer to do, and do your your customers seem to prefer.
I have always increased my hourly rate by $5.00 and worked off of that, for neighbouring cities outside of 1/2 hour. My partner has always charged for travel. We need to sit down and work out a consensus. I have always told customers about my increased rate for the area they are in and have never heard complaint.
looking for some feedback before I sit down with my partner. ( by the way we get along great) I am just looking to find out what most of you other guys do, I could be swayed, but I think I prefer the increased rate approach.
(For fellow breaktimers in the Lower Mainland. I live in Mission and charge same for Mission, Abbotsford, Ridge/meadows. extra charge for Coq and Surrey that I get work in.)
Replies
all my time starts at the office till I get back, rounded up to the nearset 1/2 hour. with two hour minimum. so travel +two hour minimum+ travel back.
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A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do...
How do you bill...do you list it as travel cost or other?
I bill by the hour, if the job is fifty dollar a hour, if the job a hour away from office, they get billed $100 travel, even if I,m a mile up the road..A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do...
Travel time is my preferred, actually only, method for compensation. It's easy to present that concept, using both lost time and mileage costs to justify the added fee.
The two cities were we most often work are 45 minutes from our little town. Anything beyond that, we have a clause in our contracts that says we have the option to charge travel time if required to work less than 6 hours onsite, or if we make an "unproductive trip" (access denied, work not under our controll not done when it was supposed to be...other reasons beyond our controll).
Bumping your hourly rate 5 skins sounds odd to me. Do customers raise an eyebrow over that? Anyone question you on it?
Heck said it first. I just agreed with him.
not to date...I will say my rate to come to "Coquitlam" is $50 per hour. and leaving it with the implication that it is a higher charge with them knowing I live an hour away. Some times I actually mention that my mission rate is $45 an hour and they haven't raised an eyebrow. These are mostly jobs I get and have happy customer at the end. Some jobs I havn't got and I have told them they can find local guys cheaper if that is what they are looking for.
But I don't know I'm always looking for better ways to do things. So I opened mined on this issue.
As much as possible I bid a contract price rather than hourly, so for jobs with more travel I just tweak the labour rates a bit to cover it - estimate the number of trips required and price accordingly. Then I can pay my crew some travel time to keep them happy, but not have the HO complaining about it - "no one pays ME to drive to work!"
If it is an hourly rate job, I charge hours for travel greater than 15 minutes one way which roughly equates to anything outside city limits.