Okay, imagine: You’ve just taken a bite of your favourite ice cream. Life is good. Then your phone rings. It’s your client.
“Quick one, could we see the study a little wider, just to see how it feels?”
Not a demand. Just a question. The client is being nice. There’s even a smiley at the end. Awww!
So, being the nice person you are, you do it. An hour and a half later, it’s done. It was a fair question, so saying no to an hour and a half doesn’t feel right, right? But… this was the third “what if” of the month. Just saying.
The first two weren’t revisions either. One was a conversation on site about the entrance. The other was a call about looking at the parking again. It didn’t feel like a big deal. Neither got a number. Neither went into an email. Both just felt like being reasonable with a client you have a good relationship with.
And that’s how the count never starts. The agreement says two revisions are included. Anything after that is billable. Everyone signed it. But the third one has to actually be called the third one, right? Because by the time something is clearly a revision, you might already be on number four. And how do you suddenly tell a client, “Oh, you owe us for four revisions”? That’s not a fun money conversation. And somehow, these conversations always come at the worst time. Even at work.
But what do you actually charge for?
Let’s say you count the study as revision three and decide to bill for it. What are you charging for? Obviously, the drawing. It took an hour and a half. Call it two. Easy.
It is not!!
The study got wider. That means the corridor got shorter. Now the door swing you decided on three weeks ago needs to be checked again. The engineer has the old layout, so someone needs to tell them. Someone also needs to check if they’ve already sent anything based on the old drawing. The furniture layout the client liked? That was based on the old plan. The contractor has been pricing from drawings sent two weeks ago. If they’ve already priced the partition, that price could now be wrong.
None of this is difficult. It just takes time to find, check and fix everything. So two hours of drawing can easily turn into a day and a half of making sure nothing else has been missed.
And you can’t always hand this work to someone else. A junior can redraw the study. But do they know why the door swing was chosen? Do they know the client once mentioned the corridor width in passing? Probably not. Because a lot of that information lives in one person’s head.
And that’s the problem. The drawing is easy to see. The checking isn’t. If you bill two hours, the client sees two hours of work and thinks, “That sounds fair.” Nobody is doing anything wrong. It’s just that the two hours of drawing were the smallest part of the job.
So the same revision causes two problems.
First, it doesn’t get counted because it didn’t feel like a revision. Then, if it finally gets counted, you charge for the part you can see.
And being stricter isn’t always the answer either. The client may not be trying to get extra work for free. They may genuinely just have a question. And if you answer every friendly question with, “As per the contract…” well, that’s not exactly great for the relationship.
Being reasonable is usually the right thing to do. The problem is when you say yes eleven times, keep no record of it, and then realise months later that you’ve done eleven extra things for free.
The fix is actually pretty simple.
It’s not even about billing. It’s about naming it.
“Happy to look at that, it’ll be revision three.”
That’s it. No awkward conversation. No long email. No surprise invoice later. You’ve simply started the count.
So when revision five comes around, everyone knows how you got there. Especially you.
The only problem? The count can’t live in your head.
Projectsmate keeps revisions against the project as they happen, so revision three is clearly revision three, for you and for whoever opens the project next.
Because a revision is rarely as small as it looks. The drawing is the part you can see. Everything it affects, is the part you end up paying for.