What is visual basic rounding?

Help me understand: rounding

• What logic is Harvest using to round up the hours I've spent on a project? And what should my general practice be regarding rounding? I'm relatively new to contract work, and this is probably an utter no-brainer, but. I've been using Harvest to track time spent on a client project, and it rounds the time spent up to, in theory, the nearest 15 minutes. But when I view the detailed time breakdown of a project, for one example project, it shows I've logged 13.78 hours, but rounds it up to 15.75. I can't seem to figure out how it's finding 2 extra hours. It's screwing up my billing projections, and it also means I can't send an invoice through Harvest without manually changing figures. And as a general question of etiquette, should I be rounding up? How much? And, if I do, should I tell my client? As far as I can tell, the only benefit of doing so is nice round numbers.

• Answer:

  If you decide to go with rounding, you definitely should tell your clients. Law firms do this, often with language to the effect of "we bill our time in increments, the smallest of which is a tenth of an hour." Put this language in your contract or engagement letter. It is not unethical to round your time as long as you disclose that you do so. The smallest billing increment I've seen (as a paralegal) is a tenth of an hour, or .1 hours, or 6 minutes. So yeah, if you work on something for 7 minutes, you bill for .2 hours, but that's lots better in situations like the one illustrated earlier in this thread, where 16 minutes of work would be billed as .3 hours rather than .5. Smaller increments are fairer to the client, I think.