ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Business Related Discussion Rounding Hours

A few years ago we changed some SOP regarding hours charged. We decided to "round off" our charged hours. If we are on the job for 1.5Hrs we charge 2.0. Also, if a guy is on the job for over 7 hours we round it out to 8, even if it's 7 hours and 10 minutes. Before we were rounding the nearest 1/2 hour. Trying to determine how many EC's do this?

We have some EC's that charge 1/2 day for anything over 2 hours of actual working time and full day for anything over 5 hours of actual work, it must work, because they have been doing this for a long time, when i asked why they bill that way, they say what can i do with the guy for the balance of time, i still have to pay him, and my overhead is a constant.
You have to remember, any job they do is a contract price, they never quote an hourly rate.

[This message has been edited by LK (edited 07-07-2005).]

I wish I was that good or experienced at estimating to never quote an hourly rate, I give that company credit for doing it successfully.

Bob,

We do pretty much the same, we have years of actual job records, so we just about know what each job will require in time, and verious job conditions.
Keep good records, and soon you will be estimating jobs for profit, pricing systems, computer estimating programs, they all sound good but nothing works better then actual job records, with time and conditions recorded.

Good advice. I have been doing that, keeping accurate records of every job, the time it took, etc, and whether or not the job was profitable. I got a few estimating books as well but sometimes these are way off, but they help sometimes.

LK - That's exactely why we decided to do that. We've learned (the hard way) if we don't round up, at the end of the day we show 6 billable hours yet payroll shows 8 payable hours. Just wasn't working out. Now that we have changed to this new charging system, we always show the same billable and payable hours, never fails.