I just signed a new retainer client!

I will be doing some phone answering for her, but other things as well. I don't typically deal with answering phones, so how do people figure hours when doing phone answering for clients? If you are on call, do you get paid for the time you are on call, or just the time spent actually answering a call?

And my second question is: How does everyone deal with vacations with retainer clients? I've never really had many retainers (but this new client is my third now), so it was pretty easy to go on vacation. I'm not sure whether I should divide the retainer hours by four (four weeks) and just bill them those hours, or just assume they will use all their hours during my vacation month.

Thanks!

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Kathy Harmacek, Your Virtual Aide
http://www.your-virtual-aide.com

Hi Kathy, I don't provide answering services so don't have an answer for you, but there are a lot of threads in this section of the forums that might help you narrow down your answer. Here's a list of search results that you should find useful.

And I'm sorry but I don't work on retainer either so I can't answer that one at all - sorry! Hopefully another VA who does can chime in.

One quick tip - to get better responses to questions such as these, try posting them individually and write descriptive thread titles. It'll draw infinitely more replies, with more direct answers.

I hope you find the info you're looking for

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