How to bill small website changes

I make Yven (Your View of Everything Necessary), which logs exactly these jobs, so I have a stake in the answer. The method works with a plain notebook too.

Why they never get billed

“Can you just swap this image?” takes ten minutes. Opening an invoice, finding the client and working out what to charge can take longer than the change itself, so you let it go. Do that a few times a week and it stops being a favour. It becomes a habit with a cost.

Ignition, a company that sells billing software to agencies, put numbers on it in its 2025 Agency Pricing & Cash Flow Report. It surveyed 273 managers and executives of agencies, website development and hosting among them. Of those, 78% said they rarely or only sometimes charge for out-of-scope work. 57% said they lose between $1,000 and $5,000 a month on unbilled work, and 30% said scope creep costs them more than $5,000 a month. A software vendor has a reason to want those figures to be large, and its respondents are agencies rather than solo shops, so read them as a direction, not a measurement of your month. You can read the findings on Ignition’s report page.

You don’t need a survey to recognise the pattern. The work is small, the friction is large, and nothing reminds you.

Three ways to bill them

Pick one policy, tell the client once, and use it every time. A policy you apply unevenly teaches clients that the rule is negotiable.

Per job

Each request gets its own line, at your rate, on the next invoice. It’s clear and fair, and it produces a long invoice of tiny lines that invites haggling over ten minutes.

A minimum increment

Round every job up to a minimum, such as 15 minutes. It covers the time it takes to open the file, find the page and check the change works, which the ten minutes of editing doesn’t count. Here’s a worked example with invented figures. Six ten-minute jobs in a month is 60 minutes. With a 15-minute minimum you bill 90 minutes, and at CA$90 an hour that’s CA$135 instead of CA$90. The extra CA$45 pays for the setup time that the clock never showed. In Yven you apply the minimum yourself: log 15 when the job took ten.

A monthly batch

Log every job as it happens and bill them together once a month, as one invoice. It’s the least work for you and the client, and it’s the policy the answer at the top recommends. The risk is a scramble at month end if you didn’t log as you went, so the logging habit matters more than the invoicing habit. Combining a minimum increment with a monthly batch is fine.

If you can’t decide, look at how the requests reach you. A client who emails each one and expects a yes or no suits per job, because the approval is already part of the conversation. A client who sends a steady stream of tweaks suits a monthly batch, with a minimum increment so the lines stay sensible. Whichever you choose, the same rule applies: write it down before the first request, not after the first argument.

Say the rule before the first request

Put one sentence in your proposal or care agreement and point to it when a request arrives. An example, not legal advice: “Changes outside the agreed scope are logged and billed monthly at CA$90 an hour, with a 15-minute minimum.” Clients rarely object to a rule they read before there was anything to pay. They object to a charge that appears after they thought the favour was free.

It also helps to know when a small request has stopped being small. If a change will take more than an hour, needs design decisions, or touches several pages, quote it instead of logging it. A quote is a conversation about scope. A log entry is a record of something already done, and it works best for the jobs where the answer was obviously yes.

What to record for each job

One line is enough, as long as it carries what the invoice will need. In Yven, pressing W anywhere opens the Log work dialog. It asks for:

• A one-line summary of what you did, in plain language.
• How long it took. It starts at 30 minutes, and you set it with the ruler, a preset or by typing the minutes.
• The client, and optionally the site and the project.
• A task type, if you use them: Bug Fix, Content Update, Client Call and so on.
• Whether it’s billable, as a switch beside the duration.
• Whether the client can see it, also a switch.
• The date, which you can back-date to when the work happened.

In a notebook or a spreadsheet, keep the same fields. Log it when you finish, not at the end of the day, because by evening you’ll have forgotten half of them. The help page on logging work has the details, and the post How to keep the receipts covers the habit.

Let the client see it

A client who can see the work you’ve done argues less about the invoice. Mark an entry client-visible and it appears in that client’s shared work log: a private link, read-only, grouped by month and project, with each entry’s task type beside its date. Each month ends with a total of the logged time and, for billable work, its dollar value.

The page doesn’t show your hourly rate, any per-entry amount, invoice status or private notes. One thing is worth knowing. Because it shows a monthly dollar total, a client who can also see the logged time could work out your effective hourly rate. A switch on each client’s overview turns the logged time off for that client.

When a fixed fee is the better answer

Some clients would rather pay a flat amount each month than approve a stream of small charges. A care plan does that: a fixed fee for a stated list of things, with an hours budget behind it. In Yven a project can be fixed-fee with an optional hours budget, and you choose what happens to time logged over the budget: bill the client for the overflow, or absorb it.

The help page gives a worked example. Say you quote a $2,000 fixed fee with a 20-hour budget, and set the overflow to bill the client. You log 24 hours. The first 20 are covered by the fee, and the extra 4 bill separately at your hourly rate. Work that a plan already covers can be marked plan-included, so it doesn’t add to what the client owes. Write the budget and the overflow rule into the care agreement, the same way the rebilling guide suggests for services.

A 15-minute routine for month end

Do it on the same day every month, and it stays small. These timings assume a handful of clients.

1. Open the work ledger and filter to the month (3 minutes). Look for entries with the wrong client or the wrong billable switch.
2. Read the summaries as the client would (4 minutes). Fix anything that says “stuff” or “fixes”.
3. Decide on goodwill (2 minutes). Mark work you’re not billing as non-billable, or write it off, so it’s a choice and not an oversight.
4. Start a new invoice for the client and the month (4 minutes). The composer lists that period’s open billable work, each line checked, so uncheck anything you’re not billing now. Pending rebilled renewal charges can go on the same invoice, and a note warns you about unbilled work from before the period.
5. Create the draft and check it (2 minutes). Mark it sent when it goes out. You can print it or save it as a PDF.

The routine is the point, not the minutes. Once it’s a fixed slot in your month, small jobs stop falling between invoices.

Where another tool is the better choice

If you bill by the minute across a team, with timesheets and approvals, a dedicated time tracker is the better fit. Yven is built for one shop logging small jobs in seconds and billing them in a batch. For your books, tax and collecting payment, use accounting software. Yven produces the invoice, and it doesn’t replace your accounts.

Where to go next

• The client book, for what to record about each client and site.
• Who pays for the domain? The money side of renewals and rebilled services.
• Building an invoice in the help centre.
• All guides.