How far to go with charging re time for travelling & costs?

[watersign76]

Hello

Looking for what others do if poss.

I have developed a few regular clients where part of the deal is me (marketing freelancer) doing some hours from their offices when required. The rest of the time will be from home where I use an online timer thing and then round to the nearest quarter of an hour. These hours in their offices could be a day or a few hours. I think it is likely to be more of the hours than days.

I had said to one, that I need to come in for longer than an hour (they are a charity, so are always looking to keep the costs down) as it just isn't worth it for me to travel to them for just an hour, which I guess implies that I won't be charging for travel time.

I live in London, most of their offices will be c45/60 min journey on the tube. I was intending to charge travel (which is obv a business expense), but not sure about travelling time, it feels a bit excessive? These are generally med sized businesses, not large FTSE 100 co's, but then maybe that sort of attitude isn't going to make me rich following on from the £1K thread!

My contract currently just says "Expenses on top" but I want to firm this up to be clear to them/or others in the future.

What do others do?

TIA

Actually I would charge travel time at your usual hourly rate as you are travelling away from your usual location of work. If you worked in an office in central london and were asked to go up to leeds, you'd book that "normally".

Beware of being too charitable to charities - some of these so-called charities are extremely wealthy. I have a friend who's charging them 1000 a day because she knows and has explained that she knows they just got a big lump of cash from the EU. It's one thing doing a small bit of work for your local women's shelter - when a household name asks for work, BILL them!

Thanks for your feedback. It is a good point about travelling away from my normal place of work.

I know, I used to work of a charity. My first words to a supplier was always "what deal can you do for us?" ! Good thing about them is you can see their income on the Charity Commission site to help gauge.

Food for thought...

I work with charities and for bigger ones I charge travel time at 50% and try to work in the train to make up the rest of the 50%. Where they are really tiny I just try to work on the train.

That sounds good MsGee, thanks. What do you do for charities if I might ask/you are willing to say. Just being nosey!

Not nosey, I'm a fundraising consultant - what about you? (am nosey too).

Oops you do marketing - brain not working today.

I've found I'm getting lots of work in current climate. Fundraising and marketing are areas where charities don't want to commit to staff but just use the expertise as they need.

I round up any time in a client's premises to a half or full day. Let's face it, by the time I travel, attend the meeting/do the work or get home, that's at least a half day gone. I try to explain to my clients they're paying for my availability and that I'm in demand - so if I'm on the train to them, I'm turning down work from someone else (this is mostly true).

I make this clear upfront and keep meetings to a minimum, and do my first 'briefing' meeting for free. It works pretty well for me and I've had no complaints so far.

I would ask why you need to be at their office - is it for meetings? Any chance of doing it over video conference using skype or similar? If not then turn up at 9am, hold meetings throughout the day until 4pm, and leave at 5pm. Bill for a whole day of your time, and make it clear beforehand what the costs will be.