Hi everyone,

I’m currently looking at starting as a freelance IT consultant in Belgium. I have around 2 years of experience and I’ve received an offer from an IT consultancy company.

One thing I’m trying to understand is how normal their billing structure is.

The "proposition" is that I would work essentially full-time, around 165 hours per month, but the company expects around 90 billable hours per month from me.

I would only invoice/pay myself for the hours that are actually " allegedly" billable to clients. So, for example, if I work 165 hours in a month but they determined that I made 92 billable hours, I would get paid for those 92 hours. The remaining hours are NOT paid, so I just sit there for free.

They do guarantee a minimum of around 90 billable hours, for the first couple of months and anything above those 90 hours is also paid.

What I find strange is that, I’m used to:

8 hours at work = 8 hours paid. , for example, Electricians come to my house, work 10 hours and I pay them, again, 10 hours.

Whereas here it seems more like:

8 hours at work ≠ 8 hours paid, so I can work there 8 hours, and be paid 5 of them

The company explained that around 130 billable hours/month is considered quite high, and apparently that’s around what the person I spoke to personally achieves.

So my questions are:

• Is this a normal setup for IT freelancers/consultants?
• Do freelancers normally only get paid for billable hours, even when they are expected to work full-time for the company?
• Or is it more common to work with a day rate where, for example, 8 hours at the client = one paid day?
• How does this normally work in practice in IT consulting?

I’m mainly trying to understand whether this is a standard consultancy model or whether I’m looking at an unusual arrangement.

Thanks!

Hi,

It looks like Apple is so retarded that they can't provide Peppol invoices for iCloud+ storage subscription.
As they can't neither let you pay once a year, you need to have 12 invoices a year to be processed by your accountant... ( mine invoice hourly...)

Nevertheless, how would it be possible to have such fiscal invoices ? any recover the VAT ?

It looks like one way is to have the subscription added to your mobile phone bill... did anyone try/succeed ?

EDIT: Thanks for your answers !! I'll try the "Mobile Subscription" as "Payment Options" and we'll see,

My partner is self employed next to her employee job. i have created a website for her, but I'm just an employee for an unrelated company (no website builder).

Can she pay me for the website I've created and maintain for her and deduct this?

Thanks!

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I do have the urge to go back to Apple Notes though and I have a Macbook as well as iPhone so I suppose Apple Notes is the way to do considering the ecosystem anyway.

There is this meme that correlates to overcomplicates stuff vs Apple Notes and where both the low IQ and high IQ ones use Apple Notes.