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Thread ID: 49274	2004-09-14 19:46:00	Repairs: do you charge "labor" ?	Earnie Moore (5918)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
272359	2004-09-14 22:21:00	at a guess i think earnie is trying to ask if you charge by time (labour) or set rate per job eg virus removal is $40 reguardless of how long a time it takes. in which case who cares, a tech can charge out however he/she likes. ernie you need more coffeee ;-)	tweak'e (174)
272360	2004-09-14 22:53:00	I would never work on a fixed price approach for that sort of thing. Machine speed, unexpected problems, weird software, variations in way machine is constructed all contribute to needing to charge $1000 in case updating a service pack turns to custard. But that's just my view. Why do I get the feeling Earnie has lit the fuse and stood well back? robo.	robo (205)
272361	2004-09-14 23:02:00	I charge for services when done in the shop,and by the hour when out on call. It only bites me when a particly nasty virus takes more then a couple of hours to remove,but then im not sitting in front of that comp the entire time and i can work on 3 or so comps at the same time easily enough...... I would guess 85% of issues i can nut out within a few minutes,Intermitent faults and complety dead comps that just won't go skew the figures.	metla (154)
272362	2004-09-14 23:04:00	Well put Tweak'e. I charge independant of each job (I charge hourly) and I give the customer a rough idea of how long it'll take before (eg. 1 hour, maybe two depending on XYZ). Ive only ever had one three hour job. Sure, sometimes I do muck about - Trying out new ways of doing things like Virus removal (Can you say http://insert.cd) and when I do that, I wouldnt dream of charging for that time. Some Tech's who constantly come back to customers asking for $500 labour for simple jobs are insane. We had a lady come in and ask for my advice because she'd taken a PC to another place locally and it'd been gone a week. She said: "I took it in and asked them if they could remove a virus I suspected I had because the internet kept on shutting down my PC. They gave it back to me and I said I'd pay in a week, only now I cant get online at all. It says it cannot find my modem. What should I do, they're looking at it now and say the bill is already $190" I laughed and replied: "They've likely removed your modem drivers which they are responsible for repairing at no cost because I dont know of a single virus which requires your modem drivers to be removed. Ask them for a report of EVERYTHING they did, including if they removed drivers etc. They might as for $20 for it, but get it. All up - To remove a virus, they shouldnt be charging more than an hour unless they're formatting your PC. One hour may be $55 for them, like we are, or it may be $95. Pay more than that and they're crazy". She thanked me, came back two days later and said she'd paid $20 for the rap-sheet. They charged her $80 for an hour and re-installed the drivers at no extra charge. So, some people charge "excessive" labour too..... We also did: $40 removal of Viruses / Spyware And we always charge a $10 Diagnosis fee if no "labour". Hope some of this rambling helps ;-) Chill.	Chilling_Silence (9)
272363	2004-09-14 23:04:00	intermittant faults are the worst	drcspy (146)
272364	2004-09-14 23:16:00	ok theres a point here......somtimes with virus removal in particular the process can take a couple of hours depending on how many scans you need to do .....and the amount of data on the hdd and the system speed. Then sometimes you need to remove the hdd and slave it to another system to do the 'deed' .... Those of you who run computer shops have a slight advantage here because you can work on several pc's at a time quite often whereas people like myself, mobile techs most often work on just the one and as you are at the job if it takes two hours I charge two hours, my charges are pretty damn reasonable though. Of course a good tech will also ascertain what the systems security is like and how well upto date it is, then advise the customer and dependant on wether they ok the work perhaps update the av, install a firewall, install Ms updates etc.....all this can take time....	drcspy (146)
272365	2004-09-14 23:38:00	I dont charge while its sitting there doing the scan... Maybe I'll add ten minutes to the time, but not an hour for a scan, and then another 15 mins for Spybot..... :-/	Chilling_Silence (9)
272366	2004-09-14 23:56:00	>Do you charge "labor" for computer repairs? Yes. But only if I fixed it. >are you not selling a service your customer does not know what to do? or put it another way, If most of your customers knew how to fix it, don't think they would do it instead, If you had a broken fence and some timber in the garrage that would be able to fix it, and you knew you could probally do it yourself, but for certain reasons you decided to get a fence repairer in to do the job for you, would you expect to pay for his service. >If you do sell "labor" as a unit of diagnostic and repair, in that case I think you are underselling the repair industry, and sorry to hear that you don't know what you are doing, but you just use a hit and miss approach to see if it will work when you finish. If he charges you is the fence repairer underselling the fence repair industry, should he have done it for free.	Rob99 (151)
272367	2004-09-15 00:15:00	I took my laptop to an apparently well-established and reputable 'computer fixit' company a few weeks ago to get it configured to work with a new wireless access point which was to be plugged into our ADSL router (all this for home use). I did this because I didn't know how to do it myself. The next day the guy from the company rang me and said he couldn't get it to work and he suspected the access point was duff. At this point I asked him much it had cost me. He said he had been working in it for three hours but would only charge me for two hours because he was uncertain what the problem was. I drove over, picked up the AP from him, took it back to Dick Smith's, got a replacement one and took it back to the guy. I said to him that I didn't want to incur too much more cost and if it is wasn't going to work I would stick with our existing ethernet cable rather than the AP. He agreed I could go up to the work-room with him to watch him working with the new AP. After watching him fiddle for five minutes I realised he didn't have the hardware Wi-Fi switch switched 'on' on the side of the laptop case. I showed him and he had the whole thing running in five minutes - and was acutely embarrassed. By this time he had spent the thick end of four hours on the job. It should have taken, what? - 20 mins? I asked him how much he was going to charge me and he said "...an hour and a half??" I didn't really want to argue, he was a nice guy who made a silly mistake, so I agreed and it cost me $75 per hour plus gst = $120-odd, plus my time and money driving around etc. The point is, if I hadn't gone to watch him, he would have said the whole setup was stuffed and I would have been puzzled but none the wiser.	basil (2970)
272368	2004-09-15 00:15:00	I took my laptop to an apparently well-established and reputable 'computer fixit' company a few weeks ago to get it configured to work with a new wireless access point which was to be plugged into our ADSL router (all this for home use). I did this because I didn't know how to do it myself. The next day the guy from the company rang me and said he couldn't get it to work and he suspected the access point was duff. At this point I asked him much it had cost me. He said he had been working in it for three hours but would only charge me for two hours because he was uncertain what the problem was. I drove over, picked up the AP from him, took it back to Dick Smith's, got a replacement one and took it back to the guy. I said to him that I didn't want to incur too much more cost and if it is wasn't going to work I would stick with our existing ethernet cable rather than the AP. He agreed I could go up to the work-room with him to watch him working with the new AP. After watching him fiddle for five minutes I realised he didn't have the hardware Wi-Fi switch switched 'on' on the side of the laptop case. I showed him and he had the whole thing running in five minutes - and was acutely embarrassed. By this time he had spent the thick end of four hours on the job. It should have taken, what? - 20 mins? I asked him how much he was going to charge me and he said "...an hour and a half??" I didn't really want to argue, he was a nice guy who made a silly mistake, so I agreed and it cost me $75 per hour plus gst = $120-odd, plus my time and money driving around etc. The point is, if I hadn't gone to watch him, he would have said the whole setup was stuffed and I would have been puzzled but none the wiser.	basil (2970)
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