Ryan CobblerToggl Track

Toggl showed me what the dentist's quick questions cost

Filed Time 4 min read Length 808 words

The Toggl Track logo, the word Toggl in white letters on a red rounded square

I spent part of a Tuesday morning in March on the floor under Tina's desk at Dr. Ostermann's office, zip-tying a cable run. Tina leaned over the edge and said, "Since you're down there, real quick, can you look at the reminder emails? Some patients got two." That fix took eleven minutes. Two days later it was the wifi password for the new printer. Then the scanner. Then a form. None of it went on a ticket, because nothing at that office goes on a ticket. They pay me a flat fee every month for the site, the phones, and the wifi, and I had never once counted what that fee bought.

So here's the thing. I priced that office by feel. For twelve years in HVAC I wrote time in and time out on a carbon copy ticket for every single job, because the shop collected them and God help you if the numbers didn't add up. Then I became a web guy and started charging flat monthly fees with no meter running at all. I quit the meter and priced on a guess.

How I counted it

In April I put a timer on everything.

  1. Set up a Toggl Track workspace and made one project per client. Nine projects, one for each site I run.
  2. Started the timer whenever I touched client work. Including the eleven-minute email fix. Especially that.
  3. Tagged every entry with what it was, a form change, a phone question, a plugin update, so the report could sort it later.
  4. Ran it a full quarter, April through June, before I changed a single price.

The quarter cost me $27 at Starter, $9 a month, and it changed the way I bill.

Here's what the report said. Dr. Ostermann's office was my lowest hourly rate by far, and it wasn't close. April ran six and a half hours, mostly the phones I wrote about in the spring. May was nine. June hit eleven, because of the printer nobody told me was coming. Divide the flat fee by those hours and that office pays me less per hour than the bowling alley, where I mostly re-mount a TV and eat nachos. Not their fault. Mine, for never looking.

What it costs

  1. Free, $0. Timers, projects, basic reports. A solo person could run this forever and never pay a cent.
  2. Starter, $9 per user per month billed yearly. That's $108 a year for one user, which is what I pay. It adds billable rates, tags, and the revenue report.
  3. Premium, $16 per user per month billed yearly. Labor costs, profitability reports, fixed-fee projects. More than a one-man shop needs.
  4. There's a 30-day trial with no card, and month-to-month billing exists but runs higher per month. I couldn't get two of their pages to agree on the exact monthly number. Yearly is the price they advertise, so that's the one I'll quote.

I'll be straight about the paying part. The free plan would have covered me. I pay anyway, because the one report that mattered, revenue by client per hour, needs billable rates, and billable rates start at Starter. If you just want to know where your day went, stay free and keep the ten bucks.

What I changed because of the numbers

Nothing got fired. The plan got a price book, the way flat-rate HVAC shops do it. In the trade, the book says a capacitor swap is $189 whether it takes you twelve minutes or forty. The customer pays for the outcome, not your slow Tuesday. The old way I billed that office was a time-and-materials ticket with the meter hidden. Bad for me and honest to nobody.

Now the flat fee covers the things that exist whether she calls me or not. The site, the hosting, the phones, the wifi box. That's the tank on the truck. Everything past that goes on the book with a set price. A form change is one number. A new page is another. A "real quick" that turns into an hour is the third. Tina saw the sheet and said, "You're not billing me extra for the email thing, are you?" The email thing took eleven minutes and it's under the base fee, and I told her so. She's fine. She was always going to be fine. The point is I finally know.

The quarterly report now sits next to the invoice, and the base fee conversation next spring will start with numbers instead of a mood.

What to do Monday

Pick your worst-guess client, the one you suspect you undercharge. Start a timer on your phone the next time you do anything for them, and stop it when you stop working, including the ten-minute favors. Run that for one week and write the hours on paper. You don't need software for week one. You need the number.