Your rate card isn't hours times a number
Day rates, overtime loadings, weekend multipliers, turnaround penalties — production freelancers don't charge by the hour. Here's how to set up a rate card that actually reflects how you work.
Most invoicing tools give you one field: hourly rate. Enter $120, log 8 hours, get $960. That’s fine if you’re a graphic designer billing by the hour. It’s useless if you’re a sound mixer billing a day rate with overtime after ten hours, a weekend loading on Saturday, and a turnaround penalty because yesterday’s wrap was at 11pm.
Production freelancers don’t charge hours × rate. They charge a day rate — a flat price for a standard day — with loading rules that stack on top when conditions change. Overtime isn’t “more hours at the same rate.” It’s a different rate that kicks in after a threshold. A weekend isn’t “the same day on Saturday.” It’s a multiplied base. A short turnaround isn’t something you track separately in a spreadsheet and remember to add later. It’s a rule that fires automatically when the gap between wrap and call is under ten hours.
If your invoicing tool doesn’t understand this, you end up doing the arithmetic yourself. At 11pm. On a Friday. After an eighteen-hour day. And that’s when you forget to charge the loading.
Rules, not prices
A rate card isn’t a price list. It’s a set of rules that describe how your charging works:
- Standard day: $1,200 (1.0×) — the baseline for a 10-hour day
- Overtime: 1.5× your hourly equivalent after 10 hours
- Weekend: 2.0× the day rate for Saturday and Sunday
- Short turnaround: penalty rate when call time is less than 10 hours after last wrap
These rules stack. A Saturday overtime day isn’t “pick the highest multiplier.” It’s a weekend day rate plus overtime hours at the weekend overtime rate. Get the rules right once, and every day you log calculates correctly without you thinking about it.
Try it — toggle the loadings and watch how they compound:
Kit rental is separate
Your camera package doesn’t get overtime. Kit rental is a flat daily or weekly rate alongside your labour charges. Most tools conflate these — one line item, one rate. But your client’s accounts department wants to see labour and equipment as separate lines, because they’re allocated to different cost centres.
Set up kit as flat-rate products. When you log a shoot day, add the kit that was on set. The invoice shows labour with its loadings and kit with its flat rates, clearly separated. The client’s production accountant doesn’t have to call you asking what the $4,800 line item covers.
The Friday night test
Here’s the real test of whether your invoicing tool understands production work. It’s Thursday night, you’ve just wrapped late. Tomorrow is a short turnaround into a full day that runs into overtime. Can you invoice that week without opening a spreadsheet?
Step through it:
If your current tool can’t do this — if you’re manually calculating the turnaround penalty and adding it as a “miscellaneous” line item — you’re doing work that should be automatic. The rate card knows the rules. Let it apply them.