The bookkeeper who questioned my monthly retainer breakdown
Last week over coffee in Portland, my buddy's bookkeeper glanced at my invoice and asked why I listed 14 separate line items for one project. She said her agency groups tasks into three buckets, progress, meetings, and extras, and that tiny shift makes clients stop nitpicking every hour. I tried it on a smaller retainer this week, the $1,200 one, and the client actually approved it twice as fast. Has anyone else found that dumbing down the invoice detail cuts down on those annoying clarification emails?
Fourteen line items is not the problem, it is the only thing protecting you when a client decides three months later that they never agreed to the extra revisions. I have seen a $4,800 invoice get cut in half because everything was bundled under "extras" and nobody could say what was in there. Fast approvals are nice until the day you actually need to prove what you did.