When you are a freelance programmer, it seems pretty easy to estimate for a programming job, right? Unfortunately you probably make the mistake most people make, and that is not estimating for all of the little things outside of the actual programming.

This usually results in getting paid for the coding work you initially do, but not for many of the other items you handle while completing the project and therefore you end up doing that work for free.

This post is to give you a checklist of things to keep in mind for your next project to ensure you get paid for all of your work, not just the coding part.

These items can be real time consumers in any project. Most clients like to be in constant contact with their programmers to ensure all is on track and going well. This means you need to do a couple things.

Meetings, Communication, & Updates

State up front to your client when you plan to have your meetings. These items can be easily planned out ahead of time so you are not agreeing to spur-of-the-moment meetings by client. If he makes more meetings than estimated for, let him know that this is out of scope and will incur a charge.

Basic meeting milestones to estimate and plan for would be

• Project Discovery – Determining scope, time and budget for the project (2 hrs).
• Business/Functional/Technical Requirements Review – After you write up all of the documentation for the project, meet with client to get it approved. this will ensure you are both on the exact same page where site functionality is concerned (1 hour)
• Prototype review – If there is a prototype requested, then you will need to estimate for a meeting to show and test. (1-2 hrs)
• Application Review – This is where you would meet to show the finished product and get approval or feedback for revisions. (1-2hrs)

State up front how often you will be supplying progress updates. This will keep him from calling or emailing numerous times per week to ask questions. Normally, a status call or email once a week is a good starting point, depending on the size of the project’s time line.

These items are all things that would take place before you even begin to write the first line of code.

Technical Discovery, Set-up and Documentation

• Technical Discovery would include researching the environment you will be working with or researching an environment in which to choose to work with.
• Technical Set-up involves creating the directory structure on the web server, constructing the database architecture, and domain/email setup and management.
• Technical documentation would comprise of any of the following… business requirements, functional requirements and technical requirements. Be sure to estimate enough time to not only write these, but for revisions after the client supplies feedback.

These items would be executed after the first version of the application is finalized.

QA/Proofing & Revisions,

• QA/Proofing – Quality Assurance, this is checking the application for functional, accessibility, optimizational, and grammatical issues. Basically, make sure the coding is sound, it will validate, work with most browsers and comply with most W3C requirements. A good rule of thumb is to estimate 5-10% of the total time you plan to spend programming for QA-ing the app.
• Revisions – This is where most people get burned. You finish the app and show it to client, the client points out many items that don’t work the way you both agreed it would, or he find many small bugs. It is your responsibility to go back and fix them all (as long as they were in the original scope; that is why it is very important to document everything). If you haven’t estimated for this, then you are working for free

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TJ Swing is the Owner of Six Digit Media. He has actively been involved in web development and design since 1998 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh technical strategies to individuals and companies involved in online business.  TJ has experience as a technical systems analyst for Bridge Worldwide and a web content/email campaign consultant for Epsilon, working with clients like P&G, Best Buy, US Bank, Fidelity, and more.