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Mike Harrison · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 12:10 pm Post subject: eLearning invoicing

A new client told me the hourly rates they pay for recording and editing, to which I agreed for their series of scripts. Each script came on separate days. After submitting my first invoices (one per script using those rates), they made it known they were expecting an accrual-style tally, where the actual record and edit time (not rounded-u Hobo Happy

for each script would be added together and the respective hourly rates would be applied to those totals, rather than to each script separately.

This is the first time I've been asked to work this way. Is this fairly common? Are there any recommendations, etc I should consider?

Thanks.
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paulstefano · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 12:48 pm Post subject:

I am seeing this on some of the freelance sites like Freelancer.com and Guru.com.

Guru even seems to have made this the default option, maybe just today? I didn't notice it before. Both of these sites also offer their own software platform for tallying the work, which makes it a bit easier, but also quite a walled garden, where you have to complete everything their way.
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Lance Blair · M&M Joined: 03 Jun 2007 Posts: 2281 Location: Atlanta

I've done this before with clients. Keep a tally of the time recording and editing on each script, and then tally them up as items on a monthly invoice.

I prefer to charge a built in rate per word/minute for finished audio slides per project.
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todd ellis · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 1:58 pm Post subject:

so - if they send you 80 words on monday, 60 words on tuesday & 32 words on friday you'd bill them for a total of one minute? that's super-nuts.

bill per session - with a minimum session fee - otherwise they will nickel & dime you to death.

try to educate the client. IMHO, in eLearning, it's a LOT easier to agree to billing per word, based on MS Word count or equivalent. it takes all the guess work out.
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Bruce · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 3:10 pm Post subject:

If the total amount of work and money are to your liking then I would think it's fine. I've done a couple of these kinds of job over the years and didn't enjoy them when the work ended up being piddly. You can set all kinds of conditions but will that be worth the hassle?

Hey, money is money. You can quote me.

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Mike Harrison · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 3:20 pm Post subject:

Thanks, guys, for the feedback.

This is a situation where the client – a European, not Indian company – has a lot of technical training for an American company. They said, "We pay $X per hour for recording and $Y per hour for editing." They asked me to take over for another guy who'd been working with them this way for some time and has just retired. I am already committed to this series (maybe 18 scripts). Based on what I've done thus far (7 scripts), I really don't see any script being much under 10 minutes, so I don't get the impression they're going to nickel-and-dime me.

I completely agree and prefer working on a per-word basis, but I don't think I can get them to change how they've been doing things, at least as I'm committed to this one series. So I'll work their way for the rest of it, and then see if they're open to discussing the per-word method.

Their method just makes things more complicated for me; no one has ever asked for an itemized breakdown of time before.

Anything else I might not have considered?
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vkuehn · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 3:35 pm Post subject:

I am going to make a wild guess here. ( I will accept all reports of the errors that I have included.)

A lot of corporate eLearning has been done in-house... not because they planned it that way... it was new and they made use of existing employees and in some cases that worked very well. Now, in the great traditions of modern corporate world, they are looking to outsource this task. (I have seen several posts in Facebook where people had worked for a company doing it in house and now they were setting up shop to do the same work as a contractor.

There are software developers churning out software that entrepreneurs are using to set up eLearning service providers for other entrepreneurial style and sized companies.

And a lot of these "players" have been in modern companies where everybody, internal and external, have to provide daily logs of what clients they worked on that day, how long they worked for them, and what was the product. Lawyers do it. Accountants do it. Architects do it.

So. If we choose to play in the newly emerging style (outsourced) of this newly emerging industry (eLearning) we are probably going to have to get used to a business style where we keep the kind of billing sheets that many of our friends have been doing for years. HERE MAY BE THE GOOD NEWS: One of my children in plays in that world says it will tell you things about your own business you didn't know, and out of the mechanism will fall the data you need to go a argue your case for the rate you are asking.

Not exactly traditional voice-over business practice during the years.

Scott Pollak · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 5:10 pm Post subject:

Mike, I do a ton of this type of stuff. Exactly like what you're talking about. As I start one of these long projects for a client I keep an Excel file open and in the First Column I put the date, in the second column I put the lesson name and in the third column the minutes. As you probably are aware you can go into Windows Explorer and click on your audio files to get a total number of minutes if you have a whole bunch of individual files. At any rate it's pretty easy to do, and at the end of the project I simply get a sum total in Excel with all the minutes and bill it. It works out well and I don't feel like it's that big of a deal. Now like Todd said, if they were sending you 1 minute a day, that would be a different story but it sounds like you're in the same boat that I'm in, where they will send me maybe 10 or 20, or 30 minutes a day.
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Deirdre · Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 5:53 pm Post subject:

I can't imagine counting actual hours spent unless someone else is doing the engineering.

I wonder if you client can be reëducated to think "per word" as others above have suggested?
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Bish · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2016 9:38 am Post subject:

I'm not seeing a big problem here. Yes, it's probably annoying to have to jump through their particular hoops, but remember... YOU are in charge of the numbers. I totally agree that this could be a pain in the backside if it's about multiple sessions or 1 or 2 minutes. Each job has a set-up time as an overhead.... educate them that there must be a charge for that (yes, it's a small minimum session fee by another name - a "crack the mic" fee) and then bill them time at a rate of 6:1 as you are doing editing and file prep. A simple "pay for my time" accounting works out as one hour for every ten minutes delivered plus a small session set-up fee to offset the sub-ten minute recordings. No need to keep a timesheet... unless you want to bury them in granular line items!

I prefer per-word as well... but that still doesn't address them wanting to mush a bunch of smaller separate recordings together into one cumulative session.
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Deirdre · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2016 10:27 am Post subject:

A session is a session.
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Scott Pollak · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2016 11:45 am Post subject:

I don't think you can equate the sessions and billing that you folks who do gaming voices or broadcast commercials with that of e-learning. It's comparing apples to arachnids. (Don't ask which is which).

As already mentioned, I have been asked - by more than one client - to keep a tally of recorded work on long projects. It's just not an issue. As I record, I log in the total minutes for each project. NOT for each individual file, but for, say, each LESSON.

Once the project wraps up, I shoot my invoice, along with the tally sheet for the total recording time (let's say there were 241 lessons that totaled up 458 minutes) and that's that. It really IS easy, and I don't see pleasing the client as bad business. Obviously there needs to be reasonable limits on some client requests, but I don't see this as either unreasonable or a big deal.
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Lance Blair · M&M Joined: 03 Jun 2007 Posts: 2281 Location: Atlanta

Todd, I agree that I would never bill by time if it was for small amounts (100 words or less at a time). Clients send a 10 to 50 minute script at a time.

I have a rate sheet for finished e learning audio that is split up for every five minutes of the hour, and it's marked in parallel how many words per minute that is (usually 140 wpm for finished audio considering the pauses for transitions). This rate sheet has an editing rate-per hour folded into it.

When a client wants to invoice by time, I try to get a rate that is in line with these pre-set rates.

From what I've seen from rate surveys, my rates are a bit above average, but not on the high end.

If a client wanted me to record in small sections at a time, we would have to work out a session/crack the mic fee.
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Mike Harrison · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2016 7:36 am Post subject:

Let me see if I can be more clear. Below is similar to the example the client gave me as to how they expect the line items of the invoice to appear:

0.30 hr VO
1.15 hr Edit
0.70 hr VO
2.30 hr Edit
0.35 hr VO
1.34 hr Edit

Is it reasonable to request such detail, or should I propose that the smallest increment of time is a quarter-hour? The quarter-hour method was acceptable by the clients of the multimedia firm I worked for in the late 70s and 80s.
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Lee Gordon · Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:54 am Post subject:

I think it is reasonable to ask for the billing to be broken down in that way. What I would do is, figure out what the total fee for the job is, and then work backwards to divide it up in a way that satisfies their requirements.
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