FDG WEB Billing Practices & Policies

FDG WEB, LLC is a full-service digital agency. This document is designed to help you understand how we offer our services and to communicate our standard billing practices and procedures in a super-helpful & super-straight-forward manner.

What we offer.

We sell our time. The time we spend providing services that you need. More specifically, we provide on-demand or scheduled design, development, or consulting services. When our services result in the production of a website, application or other digital asset or effort, you are paying for our time and expertise to produce this for you in its many forms.

How we determine our rates.

Your bill will be based upon the time spent by FDG WEB, LLC staff performing services for you at their hourly billing rate. Effective January 1st, 2022, our hourly rates for services will range from $155 (Agency Rate) to $195 (HIPAA/Emergency/Security).

It is FDG WEB, LLC’s policy to have as much of your work performed by the most capable person at the lowest billing rate. Please note that there may be some times when more experienced staff may be required to assist or review work performed by lower billing employees or perform tasks normally reserved for lower billing employees due to time constraints or client needs. In some cases there may be a minimum billable unit of time for Executive or Senior employees to work on a particular escalation problem.

What our rates include.

Our billing rates are set based upon the knowledge and the degree of skill required for providing our range of services. Compensating, attracting, and retaining highly skilled employees requires a commitment of resources, technology, education and infrastructure. Our rates reflect that we are a full-time, full-service firm who make themselves (and all our employees) highly available to our clients as opposed to individuals and freelancers.

Billing for email and phone calls.

We encourage our clients to communicate with us any time they feel the need. We also understand that clients may be hesitant to do so if it will result in a bill from us every time they do.

The service that we provide is our time, and that does include email and phone calls. The general rule for email and phone calls is as follows:

If an email or phone call is short, typically three minutes or less, and doesn’t require additional work or research to be performed, no bill will be sent. Please note that we may keep track of the time and bill for it later to account for multiple calls or emails. Occasional email and phone calls will never have a significant effect on your billing. Numerous emails and phone calls will always be reflected in our billing.

We do not usually charge for time spent drafting quotes or discussing new projects except in the case where we are performing feasibility studies or evaluations to provide you with consulting, integration advice or a plan for future development. This is akin to having an engineer or architect consult on building you a house.

How we account for time.

We use several methods to track our time spent on tasks. Primarily, we use a cloud-based time tracking system where each employee has timers for various clients, projects, and tasks. We generally bill in only .25-hour increments where applicable. It is important to note that a task we may have completed in just a few minutes for you over the phone or email may also involve follow-up tasks such as documentation, refreshing or backing up source code, backups, or other files. In some cases, units of time may represent a fixed scope of work, such as upgrades, patches, or other tasks where there is a minimum service charge or a charge that was quoted ahead of engaging in the work (a minimum block of hours). Senior staff may have a minimum amount of time they bill when assigned a task or in the case where they are working for just one client in an 8-hour day, they may round up to the nearest full half-hour or a full day rate. We always try to assign tasks to the lowest billing rate whenever possible. There will also be times where an employee may be adding back in time to previous entries or days where they were performing tasks off-hours, multitasking or working in combination with another employee who may have been brought in on a project to assist. An accounting of our billable units is usually included with each invoice or progress report. We pride ourselves on being as transparent as possible, which is why we provide such an overwhelmingly granular breakout of tasks.

Additional Fees or Expenses.

All licenses, software, bank fees, gateway fees, hosting fees or other third-party fees are considered extra fees and are never included in our estimates or bids, except when presented as line-items. While we may purchase these for you on your behalf, and bill you later – these costs are always considered to be in addition to any services we bill for. All clients located in Washington State or that have nexus in Washington State may be subject to sales tax on all software, licenses, stock photography, templates or other materials. We may add a 10% surcharge on any expense we have to purchase on your behalf or any license we maintain for you to account for transaction fees & other taxes. A copy of our resale certificate is available upon request.

How you can help reduce your fees.

We never bill you for time you do not use so we tend not to “pad” any quotes we give you.

It helps us achieve a high degree of trust with our clients to work this way. That way you know that you will only be billed for the exact time it takes to achieve your development and design goals and provide you the services you need.

There are several things that greatly increase or decrease billings for clients.

The specification(s), description, or scope of work that you provide to us.

The complexity and organization of your project, materials, troubleshooting or situation.

The amount of time you need to be trained or learn various software programs and technologies you are not already familiar with.

Specifications.

The specification is the list of requirements you come to us with that is used to provide an initial estimate of cost. If you come to us with a vague and generalized description of what you want, your billing may be higher if we must constantly change things as the project progresses.

It is ok to not know exactly what you want at the beginning of a project, so long as the time we spend helping you learn what you want is billed for.

If you want to reduce this type of billing, we encourage you to spend as much time detailing the projects you want us to work on in advance. We will always help you refine your needs and propose solutions or alternative ideas to reach your goals.

Complexity, Organization & Troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting is a complex service. We cannot always control the complexity of your individual situation. When we are engaged to help you with a troubleshooting or complex project, it is important that we have organized information. This means you should have your access information to your domain, web hosting, email or other services to us in an organized fashion. Often clients do not have this information available when they come to us, which includes the time we spend getting your project organized and to provide us even the most basic access to your files.

We are happy to organize your information for you, however bear in mind that this will impact billing as we are providing a service to you.

We also are not responsible for “how” your third-party systems need to be set up. This includes how you fulfill or ship your product, any APIs or technologies they may require. If you hand us a 128-page integration guide for UPS World Ship, Merchant Account/Gateway or a CRM program – this will always result in a higher bill as we work through previously unknown requirements.

Generally, anything you have not decided upon or not provided to us when we make our initial estimate(s) are extra costs and additional hours may need to be required. We will try to advise you of this at every opportunity.

The Learning Curve.

We love our clients, but we are not your employees and generally cannot run your day-to-day digital operations, storefront, IT Dept, customer service or be responsible for monitoring, upgrading, patching or otherwise being responsible for any part of your business responsibilities without a Service Level Agreement (SLA). If you use us as such, you may receive bills that are higher than you were originally quoted or may expect.

While we have a great deal of experience with the technologies that you use for your various systems, it does take time to reorient ourselves on your particular system and what has changed since we last worked with it or changes that naturally occur when you have thousands (or millions) or users, orders – staff who make changes daily and so on.

Many clients come to us not fully understanding how much time they or their designated employee(s) must invest into learning the various systems and technologies used to build their projects. We will always try to provide some measure of in-person (at our office), phone or email training with any project, site or storefront we build as well as provide links to any manuals or other documentation to help clients learn their systems.

We cannot be responsible for how much of this training results in successful knowledge transfer to your staff. If you want us to build you a website or a storefront, but have no interest in knowing how it works, then any tasks you request of us to maintain these projects after launch will always result in additional fees.

A few sample scenarios that result in additional billing are:

• We train a staff member on your website or application; you later designate another staff member to receive the same training. (Or, you have an employee leave your employment, and we must train a replacement).
• We’ve previously trained a staff member on a specific function or duty and are requested to train them again.
• We must fix, alter, or edit a staff member’s work product.
  Estimates.

We give the best good faith estimate that we can manage based upon what we know of your project, project goals, specification, and the sum of all communication you have had with us. This is still only an estimate, and it is not a fixed bid to take care of everything you may want or that may be required to complete your project or tasks. Unforeseen consequences, requirements or other factors may affect the total number of hours required to complete your project or tasks.

When do we bill.

Unless otherwise requested or agreed upon in writing, we will bill you for hours on a monthly basis. In the case of ongoing projects, we will always bill you on a monthly basis regardless of whether a project is completed or not. This is called progress billing. Payment is due within 15 days of receipt and a 1.5% service charge will be added to accounts that are more than 30 days past due. If we have not heard from a client in 30 days or a client has materials, input, feedback or other things that are holding up our finishing a project, we reserve the right to bill for all outstanding hours whether the project is finished or not. In the case where hours in a particular period were not billed, we reserve the right to account for and add that time back in to a separate or future bill.

Retainers.

We generally only require a retainer in the case of troubleshooting or other special circumstances. If a client wants us to be always available to them, then a retainer is always required. A client’s billing history with FDG WEB, LLC may also influence whether a retainer is required or not.

FDG WEB, LLC believes that our services are priced fair and provide a good value considering we are a full-service firm with full-time employees.

We hope this guide helps you understand our billing practices and we look forward to working with you now and in the future. If you have any questions about any of this, please contact us at 360-572-0398 or info@fdgweb.com and we would be happy to discuss it with you.

Sincerely,

The Team @ FDG WEB