Time tracking for bioinformatics freelancers 101

One struggle I noticed among beginner freelancers is the time tracking/reporting. It’s not common in an academic environment or when an employee is allocated 100% to a single project. But the reality of freelancing is such that it is essential to learn how to track your time, especially if you want to become a highly valued expert. Here are a few things that you need to learn and understand to be invoicing your clients as a professional.

When I first started as an employee in a company, I was very sloppy with my time reporting — I would just put 8h a day on a single project every day. After a few months my manager asked me to be more accurate, as my reporting led to inflating costs for the specific project where I was “dumping” my reported hours. It created some budgeting problems, as no one understood why one project was costing so much in bioinformatics costs while others had literally 0.

Many people resist reporting the time they spent on a project because they feel micromanaged. They are afraid that the project manager or the client are going to judge them for the time things take. So let me reassure you — no one wants to go through the list of your activities and judge whether implementation really took 1 hour or should it have been done in 15 minutes. But the time tracking is essential for budgeting. For example, for a government grant I need to report to the hour what employees worked on, when they were sick or had a PTO. And for some grants such reporting needs to be done to 5 minutes. So if you don’t submit your time report, someone will probably have to come up with it for you. Providing your client with a time report shows respect for their time and budget.

Another important aspect of time reporting is the team work. In consulting we often define the budget as number of hours and, with multiple freelancers working on the project, we need to know how much budget is already spent. So if you don’t report the hours you might find out that all the hours have already been used up by other freelancers, and there is simply no budget to pay you. So be kind to your client, give them a heads-up on how much project time has already been spent, so they can pay you without being stressed by re-arranging the budget to accommodate the hours you didn’t report on time. As it is often the case in the consulting/freelancing world, if there is no written memo about something — it doesn’t exist. Same goes for your hours — unless it is written down somewhere, its like you didn’t work.

Another source of frustration from freelancers is how to bill the clients if you need to learn a new tool or technology, or your computer suddenly decided to upgrade and it took 2 hours, or you spent half-a-day resolving dependencies of the new package you had to install. This is a key difference between employment and freelancing, and why the hourly rate of a freelancer cannot be compared directly to an hourly equivalent of a salary: as a freelancer you should really(!) expect a considerable amount of hours that you cannot bill to the client. This includes preparing your invoices, resolving your technical issues, even switching the context between projects (probably the most underappreciated time sink of all).

Non-billable hours also include the time it takes you to research a new method or technology. There can be an alternative strategy here though: you can bill your client like a student or an employee, and then charge them for the time you spent learning. But I much prefer to charge them as an experienced professional but learn on my own time, and only charge them for the hours it takes me to run the tool once I am familiar with it. It sets the price for the hour of your time, and you don’t want to set that bar too low. Whatever you do, if you plan to bill the client for the time you spent researching, you still need to report it to bill it.

Tracking your non-billable hours is also critical for you to be able to establish working routine with reasonable working hours. Because if you commit to 40 hours per week of billable time, all the non-billable activities will spill into your time off, which will lead to a burn out, stress and anxiety. Furthermore, tracking the time it takes to learn a new tool will allow you to better predict in the future how long it might take you, and will lead to better planning and billing.

I already touched on this in the previous paragraph, but want to be more explicit about this point. As freelancers, we often work on multiple projects requiring varying workloads at different times. Therefore, I always add 3–4 weeks to the number of billable hours as a delivery deadline. For example, if the project takes 40 hours, I tell the client: “This will cost you about 40h at my hourly rate, and you will get intermediate result in 2 weeks, and final result in 4 weeks.” Such definition helps you to deal with any unexpected circumstances, personal (you got sick) or professional (your computer got sick). You should aim at finishing most of the work mid-term before the delivery deadline, with about 75% of allocated billable hours spent, and reserve 25% of the hours for the follow-up after the intermediate results delivery. Update the client about the hours expenditure, and if you see that you do not fit into the budget, its a good time to tell the client that you expect it to take extra hours (and how many), so that they can prepare the budget.

Despite variety of time tracking tools available that can track your every activity for you and compile it into automatic reports, it is still a challenge to be diligent enough to keep track of your activities real-time. And in most of the situations such precision is unnecessary (apart from those already mentioned special cases). If automatic time-tracking is not for you, don’t frustrate over it. Just develop a habit of writing down the hours you spent on various projects at the end of the day. Most of the tools available out there have an option of manual entries, and (almost) no one really needs a precision to a minute when you did certain activities. Remember point №1 — it is not about micromanaging your time, it is for planning.

Time tracking and time reporting might seem like a bureaucratic hurdle, but if you want your time to be valued in three digits per hour, you need to be able to clearly demonstrate the value each hour of your work brings.

Happy consulting!

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