Tales of a Designer

Working Within Budgets

One thing that I’ve found to be challenging when dealing with client projects, is working within the set budget with your specified hourly rate. Typically, the process starts off with finding out what type of budget the client has to work with, and then I would let them know what can be done within that budget. Sounds like an easy process until work starts getting done.

After projects finish, I normally try to assess the work that I’ve done and how much time was spent. One issue that I’ve found, even with small projects, is that the time I’ve spent on the project far exceeds the client budget and what is paid. The end result is exactly what I’ve promised, no more no less. Yet the time researching, designing, and trying to perfect code is way more than I thought it would be.

I often question myself on how to better estimate the amount of time I put into a project compared to the budget. Every time I estimate more for myself, I overshoot it, but again, delivering what I promised. I have yet to find a solution for this issue, but maybe it will come with more experience.

I believe in giving every project my full effort, so part of me has a problem with not putting in as much effort just to meet the time I estimated within a budget. Maybe I need to embrace constraints a little more and get into a different mind set when starting off. This can possibly be done by setting goals to a number of small goals, which in turn accomplishes the overall goal.

How do you go about working within set budgets?