@study monk
To take the time to make a spreadsheet and tally up 2 or 5 minute conversations up so that you can wait until it hits a certain time mark sounds super inefficient. You say that's how ethical or “educated” people do it?? Real classy there bud.
You say i make it hard for my employer to cost items. It is my employer who used these practices that were in place while a manager at Touche and puts these policies in place when he started the firm back before I was born. It's worked well so far, and every firm i have dealt with does it very similar if not the same as us.
The $1000 per hour and $4000 per hour thought you have isn't correct. There is a difference between charging $4000 per hour, and taking an hour to do something worth $4000.
We do not advertise that we have XXX rate for XXX services. If a client comes in with a complex problem and within an hour I find a path to save him $25,000 that other people he has been to have failed to find, you are saying there is something wrong with charging more than whatever “rate” you have internally to track time for one hour of work? People are paying for my expertise and knowledge, not an hour of my time. Partners have higher rates because their time is worth more, simple as that.
The rate and time tracking is used as benchmark to see how much cost we have into a client and bill accordingly. Look up value based billing.
There are a few clients, government clients, where we have to provide a detailed bill, it absolutely has every time card rounded up to a minimum .25 and for 20+ years we have never had a complaint. Even the note on those time cards say stuff such as “emailed back xxx, or phone call about xxx”. Never had an issue.
If you were to look at most CPA firms and Law firms (even car service shops, welding shops, etc), on invoices they state minimum .10 or .25 hour per contact. A quick Google search will very well confirm that. Even so, like i said, we do not advertise or quote prices at XXX per hour, we quote for a service, the hourly rate is for our internal purposes only. So to say i am unethical or uneducated is pretty ridiculous, but ill leave that to you to figure out your own issues.