610 Billing Tip: Bill for Everything

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Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT business podcast, the show for IT professionals where we talk about products, stories and tips and help you try to run your business better, smarter and faster. Welcome to another episode where we're going to be talking about MSPs and their money, specifically billing tips. And today's episode is going to focus on the concept of bill for everything. This was a concept that was inspired by a conversation that I had with an attorney some time ago where I was having a discussion with her about, you know, how much I should bill for travel time because I was going to the other side of the state. I was going to have to stay overnight. I was going to have to, you know, account for travel back and forth between some sites there. And she basically said, bill for everything.

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And I said, I can't bill for everything. She said, yeah, you can. I said, well, what do you do when it comes to you bill? And I first asked her about the concept of billing for time. And she said, if I'm gone overnight and it's 24 hours, I bill for 24 hours now.

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I'll go a little bit deeper into that later because one I'm not an attorney and probably couldn't get away with that. Neither could you but that's where we're going to start. So today tips to bill for everything. And before we get started, this show is sponsored by our good friends over at super ops. empower your operations supercharging your success, check them out over at super ops

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Click on our sponsor page and find them along with all our other good partners of the show. All right. Bill for everything. So I mentioned that the concept of billing for everything for me started with that conversation with the attorney some years ago. It was actually supported by a conversation that I had yesterday while I was on site with an office administrator. And we had a big, huge discussion while we were in between waiting for the, well, the cable guys were finished and we were waiting for furniture people and plumbing people and all this stuff for their new space. And we were just sitting around and chatting about the cost because this office has a TJ that is going to be helping us on the day of the move, which is a Saturday. And this is a customer that they think that they're at the borderline of whether they're going to keep using us as the outsourced MSP handling their overall network management and using TJ in-house for stuff. And they're considering just bringing in their own network administrator. And so we talked about it and I said, well, what's holding you back? And they said, well, once we look at all the costs in terms of hiring the person full time, paying for health benefits allowing them time for vacation. And then of course, this customer has multiple offices. And you know, I said, Well, you know, if you hired that person in house, that person's going to should also go to those extra offices. And then he said, Yeah, then we got to pay them for travel and lodging and all that stuff. And you know, we don't pay you for that. I said, Yes, you do. All those things that you mentioned that you would have to pay an in house person you're paying me and my company for we just include that as part of our rate. And yes, it doesn't look like it on paper that you're paying for those things. But I got to have health insurance for me and my wife. I've got to pay for other types of liability insurance. I've got to pay for the subcontractors and their travel costs and all of that. It's all there. So that led to me think I should tackle this as my next topic. I had some other topics planned, but I want to want to go ahead and get started with this one. So bill for everything. Now, the one thing that I mentioned at the beginning, with talking to the one attorney was travel. I see on the Facebook in a lot of the forums, everybody, every so often asks, do you charge for travel? How do you build blah, blah, blah. And the short answer is you need to pay the bill for travel that along with all the other things we'll mention, if they're not included as part of your monthly service agreement, then you need to bill for it. How do you bill for it? Well, that may be a little different, but the short answer is you should bill for it. If you have a flat rate where you are including all of your time as part of the monthly service, and that includes on-site visits.

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Well, then you need to account for that time somehow. The way that I do it is we bill from the time that we leave our office or home to get to the client, and then we stop the clock when we are finished with the client. So in a lot of cases, we may not bill for the travel time back. Most of that is because our clients are pretty close. We have a couple of clients that are about 45 minutes or an hour away, and that time is just kind of baked into our rate. So we build them from the time we leave our office to the time we are finished with their appointment. Now, a lot of people say you should build portal to portal. So if you go to their office, do the work, and then come back to the office, that's the time you bill for. And in most cases, if that works for you, do that. In our case, there are times when we'll go from our office to a client, to another client, to another client. And so, how to divvy up that time has always been interesting. So we'll just bill from the time we leave whatever place we're at to get to the appointment. So for instance, client A will be billed for the time to leave the office to their place. Client B will be billed the time it took me to leave client A to get to client B and so on down the road. So that's how I bill my time when it comes to travel. So.

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The other things to consider is if you're billing for travel, what rate do you bill them? And some people talk about, well, you bill them a decreased hourly rate based on what your full-time hourly rate is. We just got away from that. The time I leave my office to the time I'm leaving your office, it's the same rate. I don't break them down separately. I used to and then it just got to be cumbersome to always remember, you know, Bill for the travel here. And I just said from now on, my time is my time. And that actually came from another attorney when he asked us why we had two different rates for being on site and being remote. And at first, my argument was, well, if I have to leave to go to your office, you know, I can't do anything else for any other client.

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So I'm billing you for that travel time. I'm billing you for this. And when I'm in the office, well, you know, I didn't have to leave, there's no car expenses. And he said, your time is your time. So whether you're in the office or whether you're out of the office, you bill the same rate for your time. So that's when I went to, okay, I'm not billing travel time any differently than I'm billing onsite time. From the time I leave the office to the time I do the work.

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And I'm almost at the point now where we are billing the same for remote support as we are for on-site support. But it's a little tricky because for us, all of the remote support is included in the monthly service. We only have a few clients where they're not under some sort of agreement. So we are almost to the point where it's basically one rate. And it doesn't matter if it's remote or on-site.

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But where I started to go with that is in the travel. So one of the things to consider is, do you include any incurred expenses, such as mileage or gas or tolls and all of that? Some cases, we do charge extra. If I'm going from where our office is in Fort Lauderdale to Tampa, Florida, then we're billing for all that extra stuff because we do go through tolls.

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We do charge for I used to charge for the mileage in addition to the hourly but because I'm now charging the full hourly rate I don't charge for the mileage. Of course if you have to stay overnight you bill for the hotel charges. If you have to eat you bill them for what it costs you to eat. And it doesn't matter if it's breakfast at the hotel or lunch or dinner you're billing them for every single thing.

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So when it comes to travel, I know that's a lot packed into that first tip, but it's something that is crucial that anytime you are spending working for that client away from your office, whether it's down the street or across the state, bill for your time for travel. Another thing that we have sometimes trouble with is billing for phone time because... Again, if this is included as part of your end user support costs for monthly service, then yeah, that should be baked into what your costs are. But if the person is not under agreement or it's something that necessarily doesn't fall under the scope of work, meaning it's not regular end user support, it's not typical desktop maintenance, it's not backup checking or something like that vendor call, say an ISP change and you have to get on a conference call with the ISP vendor to go over all the on-site requirements or you have a vendor that is part of a new software installation and they are asking you for a few minutes of your time over the phone. Well that's not a part of your regular support for the client. So if you spend 30 minutes doing that with somebody that should be a bill. And whether you bill it as phone time, or you bill it as vendor management, or whatever the case may be, you bill for that. Now, if the customer is not under a managed service agreement and you spend 30 minutes troubleshooting an issue with them, well, then you need to bill for that. That's probably self-explanatory for a lot of you. This third area, I think, is probably the trickiest consulting time. Now that kind of blended in with what I just mentioned previously for phone time because of a vendor call. But anything that is considered consulting, and that may be, you know, things that you do not directly relate to support, but say you are researching for that client what it would be like for them to upgrade their billing software and I'm going to speak from attorneys because that's where I'm getting these from. So if they're looking to do an upgrade and I have to research, well, what does it mean? Do they have to upgrade their server? What are the system specs for that? Do I need to talk with somebody about an upgrade process? That is considered consulting time. That's not a part of their monthly service agreement. If there is something where the client wants to talk about, hey,

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we're thinking about adding an office or we're thinking about upgrading these systems at this particular office. Well, that's consulting time because again, it is above and beyond what you normally do for your monthly service agreement. Now again, if you have an agreement that includes everything, you're like anything we talk about, any remote support we do, anything with, if that's all included, great, but you have to account for consulting time, research time, vendor management time, as part of that training and education. Sometimes training may be part of the onboarding of a new user that you're sitting with them and explaining to the user, this is how you log on. This is how you get into remote support. We have customers where we've got to do a thing every time we onboard a new user. They're also set up for remote access through TruGrid. So we've got to send them the PDF that shows them how to use TruGrid, but then we also have to give them the option of, if you run into trouble, here's a link to set up a remote support time of 30 minutes that we can go on and troubleshoot with that. So for that particular, well, for one, two, three, for three particular clients, that is not included as part of the monthly service, but for two of my clients that are using TruGrid, it is. It's just included as part of the onboarding.

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So a lot of those things when it comes to providing advice, maybe they call and say, hey, we're looking at this and we don't know if it relates to IT, can you help us? Or we're trying to do some other things, can you help us that anything that has to do with advice, strategic planning, you know, if you're not including those VCIO tasks as part of your monthly billing, that should be billed separately and extra.

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And then of course service calls. We all understand that I think to the degree, but there are a lot of people that may do a remote only support agreement, which is what we do. Our monthly service for the most part does not include on-site time. We only have one customer that we include that with, and that is a very special one-off case scenario. But for all of our other service clients, the monthly service is remote support only if I have to leave my office, it's a bill if I have to send somebody it's a bill and Those are the types of things where that encompasses that travel time that we talked about Trying to look at my notes here so yeah, anything that requires on site even if It turns out that we go on site just to simply reboot something. That's going to be a charge We mitigate that

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However, by having watt boxes everywhere as much as possible so that we don't have to do a truck roll. But the customers know that if that doesn't work and we've got to send somebody, or if there's some other scenario where something's not working, my WIFI’s not working, and we can't troubleshoot it remotely, if I got to go on site to simply check that it's working, whether it's working or not, that's going to be billable.

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Now again, there can be exceptions. Maybe you include wireless access as part of your monthly service. It's a separate line item. Wi-Fi management should be included in your monthly service if you're doing that. We do have a client where we add a line for, we have the Datto wireless access management. I think they have 11. No, I think they're down to 10 access points across their locations. So we bill them 10 bucks a month for each access point. And so that kind of gets included into their management. So if there's a trip charge, because you know, Wi-Fi isn't working for something, and it's just a quick trip, we check it, it's working, or we have to reboot an access point, then that's included with them. Now again, if you've got data access, you can obviously reboot from the dashboard. Ruckus I can reboot from the dashboard. Those are the two that I use. If you have another access management system that you cannot reboot, you can obviously hook it up to a particular type of PO switch where you can power cycle the power on that port off and on. Those types of things. So that would help mitigate doing an onsite visit. But again, if you have to go onsite, in my opinion, if you're not billing for that as part of the monthly, every visit should include some type of charge, whether it's just a trip charge, you may give them a reduced rate of saying, look, we know you're, you're paying for monthly support and this is your cost and maybe we just charge you a trip charge for a visit, whether it's 15 minutes or two hours, it's just a straight trip charge. And that would at least cover some of the time that the tech or you are away bill for the entire time. All right, I think that's going to do it here. So quick tips on bill for everything, as I have learned from my attorneys over the years. So in conclusion, ensure that you are being compensated for your services and maintain transparency. We talked about that last time with your clients. Remember to incorporate your travel expenses your phone consultations, consulting time, as well as your detailed service billing into your invoicing practices to optimize your revenue generation and of course, hopefully increase client satisfaction. And that's going to do it folks. Thank you for tuning in to the IT Business Podcast and stay tuned for more insights on managing your business effectively. We'll talk to you soon. See you later. And until then, Holla!