Software Engineering Stack Exchange
Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [billing]

21 questions
36
votes
13 answers

"Kill switch" in customer hosted environments, to protect payment?

I have a difficult client. Every bill is argued and debated over, and each email is parsed with a lawyers eye (because he's a lawyer), looking for a way to avoid paying for something. No amount of generosity on my part is ever reciprocated. The…
Sam Grunion
  • 363
  • 3
  • 4
34
votes
3 answers

Contract Billing - How would you handle 'learning time'?

So you take a contract where you have solid experience with 75% of the technology necessary. How do you handle your time to learn the other 25%? Work it into the billing time? Expose the 25% in the contract as 'research'? Do the learning on my…
codeyoung
  • 2,036
  • 16
  • 19
15
votes
7 answers

How should I describe the process of learning someone else's code? (In an invoicing situation.)

Edit: Justin Cave made a good point that this sort of communication should be up front in my quoting / estimations. Is this case, I'm still interested to know what sort of language people use to describe the 'existing code learning' activities. …
MattyG
  • 253
  • 1
  • 6
13
votes
3 answers

Customer relations in agile development

My management just asked an unprecedented question in my (admittedly brief) history with the organization: "What can we do to help you?" Simultaneously, we're working several big projects for a fairly new client whose ability to push requirements…
Dan Ray
  • 9,106
  • 3
  • 37
  • 49
12
votes
4 answers

Hourly or per project billing?

How do you bill your programming projects? Do you do it per hour? Per job? Please include what kind of project you are doing in the answer. (Mobile, Web, Desktop, etc... You can be more specific if you want.) BONUS: If you'd like to give specific…
Moshe
  • 5,022
  • 2
  • 30
  • 49
10
votes
3 answers

Minimum billable time unit - industry standard for contract programming?

We're a client that recently hired a contract programming company for some fairly focused work (essentially writing 'scripts' to extend the functionality of a third-party enterprise application). We're trying to evaluate their performance on and the…
ErikE
  • 1,151
  • 1
  • 8
  • 18
6
votes
4 answers

What should I keep in mind when writing custom software quotes?

I've been asked to give a quote to extend a piece of software i'm currently giving away for free for use by a company. They tell me they are using it in-house at the moment in conjunction with some "post processing" steps, which they would like to…
Scott
  • 163
  • 1
  • 5
6
votes
2 answers

Do payment terms effect project design methodology?

When working on a software project for a client, there are two ways in which this can be billed - fixed fee project, or per hour billing. Does the choice of payment terms effect the design methodology you would choose to use? For example, one of the…
Gavin Coates
  • 1,054
  • 5
  • 11
4
votes
3 answers

In what visual format should I present an estimate for a software project?

What I mean is, do people print some kind of line item form? What data does it contain? What are the line items usually? Otherwise, do you just present a written document describing with a paragraph? Do you show the number of hours or just a lump…
MetaGuru
  • 2,663
  • 3
  • 22
  • 31
3
votes
2 answers

Designing distributed invoice number counting system

I am looking for a way to design a system that can provide a linear and incremental counting for invoice number accros a scalable system. At this time, I have four pools of two servers (two pool for europe and two pool for america -> total eight…
mik3fly-4steri5k
  • 228
  • 1
  • 9
3
votes
3 answers

Handling invoices with timestamps

I'm currently going to write something to automatically create invoices with cronjobs by using PHP and timestamps. I have a, for me, well-considered idea of how to solve it, but I want to ask the community if someone may see errors in reasoning and…
Fabian
  • 133
  • 6
2
votes
2 answers

Charge client for SaaS development?

Situation: For many years, ACME corp has outsourced Task B to me. Over the years I've learned the ins and outs of Task A (manual labor). Together Task A + Task B = finished ACME corp product. So now I discovered an opportunity to optimize their Task…
Level1Coder
  • 131
  • 6
2
votes
2 answers

Estimating How Many Hours A Project SHOULD have taken

I am the senior developer at a company I work for and we have rapidly added many other developers and contractors. Our company is growing and that is great! Recently however, I have been tasked with code review (which is fine) but also with giving…
Jafo
  • 139
  • 4
1
vote
1 answer

Build an object from two data sources - Which design pattern would be suitable?

Problem statement - I have to construct an invoice (having line-items, legal details, payment details etc) using booking and payment information of a hotel booking. There are two sources for these two data points (payment+booking) - a third party…
Utsav T
  • 125
  • 1
  • 7
1
vote
2 answers

Best way to design a billing system for a SaaS

i am working on a SaaS project that provides some services that people can call via API. My problem is how do I build the billing algorithm. I want to charge on every call to the service. Now I'm looking for ways to make the call faster and I fear…
Tom Peach
  • 209
  • 2
  • 8
1
2