Getting a budget approved

- Okay so I've just sent over the pictures of the wireframes over to Aria. And what I'm gonna do is just update my account and my board as expected. So now, gone from in progress to wireframe the site. And you know what we want to do is make sure this eventually gets into completed so that we can actually start budgeting this. Now, if I just quickly go back to my emails, we can have a quick look. I've got a new email back and here, Looks great, no changes from me.

Perfect. So now what we can do is actually change this from Awaiting Approval into Completed. Now what we want to do next is work out how to budget this. Now of course what we have to think about is all of the stuff over here in the No Status. Now, she hasn't agreed to any budget yet, so we can't move these into here, into To Do, So, how do you go about thinking about this? Well, we know that there's four things to do here. There's actually quite a few things.

Now there's two ways to think about how to budget this. One is on an hourly or a daily rate, and the other one is a project rate. So either I say I know the confines of all of this stuff I'm going to give you a set amount, or I can give you a rough estimate based on what my hourly or day rate is going to be. Now for this, it kind of depends on how you work. If you're someone who likes to do a day rate or an hourly rate or a project rate, kind of go with that. If you haven't ever done this stuff before, generally go for an hourly rate.

But how do I know how long all of this stuff is going to take? Well, I've just done the wireframes really, really quickly so I might be like "Oh the logo might only take me an hour." Now the issue that we have here is we wanna make sure that there's some kind of way for revisions. So what I could do is, let's say this logo design goes to here and then it goes into Progress and then we go into Awaiting Approval and then it goes into Completed.

That is the best case scenario. But generally what happens is it goes to here, then they have some changes, so it goes back into Progress. Then it goes back into Awaiting Approval. Maybe they have some more changes, and back and forwards it goes. Now what we are gonna do is limit this a little bit so it's not going back and forwards a thousand times because this could take hours and hours and it's never kind of right. So one thing that I like to do is make sure there's a set amount of revisions.

And what I mean by that is we can send it to the client a set amount of times, say three times until it Awaits Approval. Now the reason for this is it gives the client a bit of a kind of heads up that if it's any more than this, they'll need to pay extra. And basically it stops clients messing you around. So what I like to do is I'm just going to move this back into where it should be, which is currently in No Status and what I want to do is kind of work out how long this is gonna take, at the kind of like 75% of what it might actually be.

So not the kind of medium point, not the best case scenario, not the worst case scenario, but around about 70-75%. So maybe something like Logo Design would take maybe around eight hours if you'd done it before. Just in case you've got the three revisions in there so it might be something more like 10 hours in total. So maybe like 10 and a 10, then maybe a 20 and a 20, so maybe something like 60 hours in total kind of on the higher end. For something like this, a project like this for me, maybe around 16 hours is the kind of total what I would kind of expect.

Very basic site, very simple website, a very simple kind of code in here as well. So what I'm going to say to Aria is "This is gonna be roughly 16 hours with three revisions on each point. So I'm going to reply to her, which is like Great, and I'm going to write a quick email saying "This is my day rate, it's gonna be roughly 16 hours of work and then what we're gonna do is if it goes over, outside of the revisions, then I can charge some off that. So I'll give her a set rate based on my 16 hours.

I'm just going to write this quick email out. So I've just written this up. Now this is probably on the high side, I've said $100 an hour just to make it a nice round number, yours might be lower, yours might be higher. Generally might be lower than this, generally. So I've just kind of done this as a nice round number for now, but this is kind of what I've said to her. "The budget I expect this to be around this price, which is roughly 16 hours of work at this.

For this, you'll get three revisions of logo design, three revisions of the branding, three revisions of site layout, any book fixes, and we'll get the site online onto a domain of your choice." Now generally with this, I'd send them a contract so that they have something to sign. Now, depending on where you are in the world, there's different kind of contracts. If you're in America for instance, there's the AIGA, a Standard Form of Agreement, which is really, really good.

You can kind of download this and kind of customize it to your own needs. And for me, I've generally used this in my own freelance project, so this is something that I actually recommend as well. So generally what I do is set up a contract based on that, give them a kind of expected budget. Anything outside of this, they will get charged for extra. And I would sign that, get them to sign it, and then hopefully once they've signed it, it means that we can do this and to send that for approval.

Hopefully if she approves, we can get started on this.