Robert R. Fenichel

Fee Schedule, Billing Practices, and Contracting

General

My scheme of choice is to be paid by the hour, including some compensation for any time spent in your interest, even if — as with travel — the time is not intrinsically productive to you or to me.  Only in this way can we be protected from such anomalies as

  • my being paid for only an hour’s work even though the one-hour meeting entailed a full day of travel, or

  • your being charged for a day’s work even though the meeting in Vancouver turned out to last only an hour.

I expect to be reimbursed for routine travel expenses.  These may include

  • use of my personal automobile), billed at the IRS-suggested rate for general business use of automobiles (e.g., $0.50/mile for 2010);

  • no-show and flight-change fees, when these are attributable to your failure to give me timely notice of changes in your plans;

  • business-class airfare for flights longer than 3 hours; 

  • on the morning of arrival in Europe after an overnight flight, a hotel room available then, even if this entails booking the room for the entire previous night, and

  • visa fees.

I usually mail invoices at the end of each month, except that accounts receivable of less than $100 are generally not invoiced until a larger amount has accumulated.  The best way to pay me is to mail me a check drawn in dollars on a U.S. bank, but other arrangements are possible.  In particular, payment in Canadian dollars is fine, using any reasonable current factor for currency conversion.  Fees imposed by your bank  in the course of wire transfers (typically $10-25) must be borne by you.

Preferred Scheme

My hourly rate is $500 per hour.

Time spent in travel to your location is charged at $250 per hour, billed

  • from the time I leave home until the time I arrive at the distant hotel or meeting place, and vice versa,

  • for travel time between distant hotels and meeting places, and

  • to complete 8 hours of billed time, on any day that I am away from home for a full day (that is, for a period that includes both the preceding and following nights) that includes less than 8 hours of actual consulting,

except that

  • travel time in excess of 8 hours per calendar day is not billed; and

  • travel time otherwise billed (e.g., used for reading client documents) is not billed as travel time.

Travel time that serves the interest of two or more clients will be billed in a pro-rated manner.  Because this situation arises fairly often, I prefer to make my own air and rail arrangements, although I usually rely on clients for hotel reservations and local transportation. 

My Use of Clients' Names  

Most non-commercial presentations now are required to include an accounting of the authors' potential conflicts of interest.  This accounting generally takes the form of a special-purpose slide or an appendix in a published paper like this one.  In the same vein, the names of my recent clients are listed elsewhere on this Web site, although a few clients have (their preference) not been listed.  I make no other public use of the names of my clients.

 

Page revised: 02/08/2010 12:40