I do book marketing and web design. One of my clients has put out several books in the past few years. Which means she has a completely different portal for each one. Now it is time to do billing and it is a huge mess. I had 5 different invoices, some of them over hours, some of them not fully fulfilled, one flat rate. I do not want to ask her for more money if there are still funds for another project. To her it is all the same, whether the hours go to one book or another.
So I had to export all the hours into a huge spreadsheet and manually tag everything to get a good sense of how it is all going. I have spent over a week putting all this together. I think HB staff would be horrified to see how much work I had to put into producing this invoice. I know the client would rather me be doing the work than staring at spreadsheets she is not going to read---but I can only earn/keep her trust by having the confidence that I’m billing honestly. Part of the reason I had to export and work in a spreadsheet is that HB doesn’t integrate the time tracker much (which I have posted about in the suggestions forum). I think another reason this was causing a problem is that I can’t simply edit or merge the project once it has been started. I even have a project called “DELETE” that was automatically generated when her husband scheduled a consultation for an existing project.
When I first got into HB, I was excited to create these fully customized campaigns with various service options. And I still love HB and recommend it to anyone. But in the future I’m going to go back to simplified campaigns where the client pays for X hours and the project is just the client’s name.
She wants me to pay to run ads for numerous books. I already have projects for each of her books. But I am definitely not going send her a separate bill for each one, nor do I want to set up yet another project portal.
So I’m wondering if other people have run into these issues or if it is just me. If your projects are flat rate, maybe it is not an issue. When I offer web design packages flat rate, separate projects make sense. But for hourly billing ongoing services I am struggling.
