The Freelance Guide to Invoicing: Deciding how much to charge.
If you find yourself doing freelance work one of the hardest things to do is to decide what to charge. Now let’s be clear here, I am not talking about and hourly rate – that’s easy. Just look at any job ad and you can decide what your worth. No I’m talking about how much TIME it will take you so you know, therefore, what you should charge your client. If you have no experience, here’s a broad rule of thumb guide for producing an Articulate Presenter™ based course, based on 30 Presenter™ slides:
1. Define: Get the content right from the off by having very clear and AGREED Intended Learning Outcomes. This will enable you to establish the SCOPE of the course. 1 day
2. DESIGN (gather the content and write the copy): Usually your SME’s will give you a bit of their time and probably some resources. You have to be able to write good copy – quickly and efficiently. If the design is good and it will mean you won’t waste time and therefore, lose money! Allow for 5 days. Get the design documents, storyboards and scripts signed off by your customer and get them to pay part of the bill.
3. DEVELOP: 1 screen = one day. That may sound excessive, but if you are going to have any kind of quality control you ought to produce a prototype followed by at least one other version (at the moment I’m doing two versions beyond the prototype because my client has “three heads”).
- Audio recording. Recording narration for a course takes two days. One day to record it, one day to edit it, normalise it, and file it. 2 days.
4. TESTING: Quality checking and testing – 5 days. Ideally, get your customer to do some QA as part of their internal function. This can be a good time to send part of your bill.
5. DEPLOYMENT: It has to go somewhere. It may be just uploading to web space. More likely you’ll be loading it into someone’s LMS. – 2 days
6. Project Management: Don’t miss this out! Whatever time you have budgeted for so far add a further 25% worth. Communication, documentation, travel, troubleshooting, negotiation, invoicing all takes time. As a freelance you don’t have the benefit of having a corporate structure that can take care of this (you just don’t have the economies of scale).
OK let’s add it up:
Define: 1
Design: 5
Develop: 30 (let’s assume a 30 screen Presenter™ file)
Audio: 2
Testing: 5
Deployment: 2
Project Management: 14
Total = 54 days
Calls that 11 weeks work (allows some time for delays – but remember that is NOT your cost). If you’re a freelance you can charge £150 - £300 (oh I wish!) per day so that’s £8,100 - £16,200 gross. Get four contracts in during a year and you get £32 - £60K gross.
So when you’re asked, “how much will this cost?” – You should reply “£300 pounds per screen”. That should be enough to focus the mind of a verbose SME!
