Either bill them in advance or have them purchase your ticket in advance.
Any major travel expense shouldn't be on your dime unless you're very acquainted with the customer.
I always find it easier to just have a fixed line item for "travel to client events", and usually I end up coming out ahead by a substantial margin by not booking fancy hotels.
It's possible a client will ask you for the travel expenses receipts and it would not be nice to show him that there is difference between what you charged and what it did actually cost.
e.g., a month ago someone wanted me to travel to their site.
Although I didn't end up going, my fee to do that would have been much more than just the travel (6 hour drive to another state) and hotel costs: I also have to factor in that while I'm travelling, those are hours I can't bill to any other project, so the client would have been billed for the full two work days of travel even though my out of pocket costs would have been much less.
I am not willing (in order to be 9am on the client site (in another country) to spend half a Sunday away from home and loved ones for free. I usually charge 1h commute +2h in the airport pre flight + duration of flight + commute to hotel post flight.
No, it's a travel fee. When I hire service workers to make house calls, I'm under no impression that the line items for traveling simply covers their expenses. I expect them to make a profit for the privilege of having a professional show up in person.
In the UK there's, for example, a standard "mileage charge" which people tend to claim for driving to a place for work. It's not "the cost of travel" it's an approximate.
When a company charges for sending an operative to a site, they pay the operative £10 ph, and charge the company receiving them £100 -- presumably you think that's fraud too?
How about when Guchi (made up company) charge you $500 for a plain white tshirt made by people who aren't paid a living wage, wouldn't that also be fraud under the same sort of consideration?
Standard "mileage charges" in the US are actually set by the IRS. I assume it's similar in other places so that's a well-established practice for car-related expenses. I'm not sure how else you would do it as there's no way to directly capture expenses other than fuel.
I assume that in most cases billing some standard travel day rate/per diem (perhaps based on location) would be fine as well with, possibly, air charged separately for the actual amount.
The key is that you're being explicit that you're not charging the actual amount but rather some standard rate that, in principle, approximates average/typical expenses.
There are similar mileage rates in the UK, published by HMRC. They have the same purpose.
The mileage rate you agree with your client needn't be related to those rates at all.
I was just asking. You are putting "travel expenses" @ $xxx which doesn't seem to include your rate; so it should be how much you spent to "get there". If you want to charge extra (and I think you should since it's time you spent for the client) then maybe put "travel expenses" + "x hours spent traveling".
The bottom line is on your end, you should be capturing receipts, you should be logging costs per project, and you should be providing all this data to an accountant for a nice quarterly rollup.
- Bill the client for actual expenses
- Paid out of pocket for travel that was baked into the day rate
- Had major travel (air/hotel) paid for directly by a client's travel agent. (Which I actually preferred to avoid when reasonably possible because now you're dealing with your client's travel policies.)
I'm not an accountant but I tend to agree you shouldn't be billing a broken-out travel line item that's not actual expenses or expenses plus explicit overhead [or a standard per diem].
For flights, you have a couple options. Either make the client buy your tickets, or tell them about your policy of purchasing refundable tickets. Alternatively, you could just eat the change fee (but that has its own set of issues - if you use the ticket personally, you need to pay income tax on the cost of the ticket; if you use it for a different client meeting, billing THAT could be tricky) or you could just write it off as a loss.
One additional tip here is to purchase cancellable / refundable airline tickets and hotel reservations. You don't want to get stuck with the bill if your client cancels a meeting or whatever. Made this mistake with a long-term client where it wasn't worth trying to get reimbursed for travel expenses for a canceled meeting.