I bill my customers for both access ot me, ie email/cell phone response within a two hour timeframe, and a separate charge for instant messenger online response within minutes. One hour per day for each of the access types covers general hardware and software support kinds of questions. If I have to do research to answer a question, or perform diags through the net, time is billable by the hour. If you have a history with the customer, you can total the number of billable hours per year, divide by 12, to come up with a monthly average. Offer the customer prepaid time in increments or blocks of time per month of onsite time, with a minimum cost of 4 hrs each visit to a site to help absorb your travel and onsite time costs. If you are traveling to or from his site you are not making money anywhere else. If it is only an occasional visit required on an on-call basis, to a site within the metro area you cover, a block of, let's say 15 hours per month,8 to 5 m-f gives them 15 hours of your time, including travel anytime during daytime business hours, onsite or on the phone, or doing research for them, or working on a problem, piece of software, etc. If they want you on call outside of 8-5 m-f, then the hourly rate for the contract goes up , as does the on-call access rate, ie 1 hour per shift of availability per day. It all depends on you customer base, and how much of your billing comes from each. Adjust your service contract offerings accordingly. It will help even out your income, and provide the customer with more predictable costs over the year, that they can plan for in the budget process, with procedures put in place for the billings that occur outside the contracted for amounts. It will also help customer management to enforce discipline on their staff to more effectively use your services to minimize out-of-scope billing events. where possible, I have modularized my services, ie, a simple router checkout is x amount of time, modules are a different amount of time, similar to the flat rate charged by auto repair shops. If troubleshooting is required that goes beyond my self imposed limit of twice the normal time to accomplish the task due to intermittents, or other difficulties, the billing switches to hourly. For example, if I get a group of devices from a particular supplier giving me difficulties, I put the whole batch on the meter, rather than by the task. The customer will think twice about purchasing equipment from that vendor again. Of course, part of the deliverables to the customer, is a detailed report on the activity, and the reasons for the billing. Many times he is able to pass it on to the supplier of the equipment, and obtain a credit for my fees from the supplier.
Until I started doing this, my billings were extremely uneven, and sometimes seemed seasonal.
If you have any more questions, let me know.
