Okay.
I am thinking to charge hourly. Will be a small inventory mgt dbase for about 100 pallet spots, transfers, and report features.
It will be 2 or 3 master tables, a few queries and a few reports.
Thinking to charge hourly (ONtario, Canada) $40.00 because I'm not a pro....and to add extra fees for support, and additional reports or add ons.
Considering the above, does my price structure look reasonable? Should support charge higher or lower than initial design? Should Reports charge by the each or by the hour?
Zesty:
Just some thoughts you may want to consider:
- One way to view the question would be not so much what you think is a competitive hourly rate (more about this soon) but what you think the benefit to the client is. In other words, without knowing more about the application, is this something that can be purchased for a few hundred dollars off the store shelf? If so, it may not be worth the time and headache for you or the client to develop something custom. When I say 'headache', please remember that there will be significant problems with forms that don't function as they should, funny error messages that you have to resolve, reports that give incorrect or missing data and so on until you've gone through and debugged the program, usually having the client "test drive" the application. It's a process that can take some time till things are just right.
- Assuming that this is not something readily available, what are you are offering to the client in terms of your expertise? Is this an industry that you are familiar with so YOU will be guiding the project (in which case you can charge more) or are you just following what the client requests from you in which case all you are doing is following the specs given? Is this something you will be designing from scratch or something that you already have basic components for. When I started programming freelance, I already had tables for clients, invoices, invoice details, some basic accounting and reporting and so on so putting together an application took less time.
- I don't know where you are in Ontario, but I'm in Toronto. $40 an hour after you pay out tax...well, you get the idea. Unless you have many, many projects and you're doing this eight hours a day, it would be hard to make a living. If this is just for additional income during weekends and evenings, that's something else for the client to consider. That would mean that you are probably not available during work hours which may make meetings difficult which your client should be made aware of before there are any surprises. (Again, I have no idea what your schedule is
) If it helps you any, when I had 10 years of Access experience, I was charging about $120 an hour (again, I'm in Toronto which may be different than where you live)
- One thing I can't overemphasize the importance of is having
a proposal in writing. I'd rather spend an extra few hours debating with a client and possibly run the risk of losing the client than having clients who keep adding to the project, keep saying "but you said the application would do X", asking for "favours" (can you JUST add one more report...pretty please...?). You can go for
years with a client saying that a project is "incomplete" because you didn't do something that was completely not specified when you quoted the project initially. What I do is allow the user to change their mind or add on one or two things to allow myself to be a "nice guy" and then I step in and say "sorry, but that's not on the proposal. I've already added 2 items as a courtesy but this can be done during Phase II of the project which will require a new estimate".
- On the proposal, I have an exact description of what the client will receive, an estimated cost (I'll explain how I get this number soon), a projected timeline as to where we want to be in the project at what point in time, terms of payment (make sure to get a decent deposit), migration details (are you intended to import data from a previous application?), training (is it included? What if they get a new staff member after you train the client?), support (I usually charge 10% of the initial fee yearly), and what taxes are applicable (probably GST and possibly PST if you are reselling a program but don't go by my word...ask your tax professional!)
- The way I estimate the cost is to estimate how long each stage of the project will take in hours and multiply by my hourly rate. I then automatically add on 25% because problems DO emerge when you're programming. I usually give an estimate by stating a range (e.g. $1200 - $1400) in case things do get difficult (think of yourself trying to debug code on a form or some join that doesn't give you the query you were hoping for and then having to come to Access World Forums to ask for help
)
This is probably more than you wanted to hear but I hope I've provided some sort of food for thought.
Good luck
SHADOW
