My wife works for a small non medical home care agency and one of the clients is an old friend that also got her the job. The owner of the company is charging this client for time it takes to make the schedule and also is charging for time taken to train the employees she hires (she has a high turnover rate) along with charging for staff meetings (that she holds at the clients house). When the client mentions this, the owner makes it seem like she should be paying it but if she doesn't want to, basically tells her the employees just won't be paid for training or mandatory meetings which I have already informed the client is illegal but the owner is trying to play off of her nice side. I guess the question in all this is, do small businesses usually charge the clients for training of employees and scheduling or is that an overhead of the company?
We charge a flat hourly rate for our client work but not for estimating/bidding *usually* but there are some clients who are obnoxious in asking for bids over and over and then never giving us the work (and with no explanation) so we started giving them outlandish bids where we literally made up numbers and they never wasted our time again. But if they accepted that bid...yea!