Billing Policy

The following article serves to outline our billing policies for any work completed.

Understanding the concept of billable hours is vitally important to the partnership we have built with our customers. The hourly based billing is charging for services against time spent. 

Billable hours are tracked by specific actions. Each Paradigm consultant has an hourly billing rate that is reflective of his or her job title.

General

Your monthly software subscription covers:

• Use of the software
• Upgrades and Maintenance
  • New versions are released with fixes, new features and the latest software technologies.
  • Software upgrades and maintenance are often performed after hours and are covered by your monthly subscription.
• General Software Support
  • Email / Telephonic Support, Mon - Fri, 08:30 - 16:00.
  • If the user believes the software is not behaving as expected, this is deemed software support. A support-desk consultant will intervene to either rectify the issue, or help the user understand why the software is in fact working as expected.
  • Essentially, the support-desk is there to ensure that the software that you are subscribing to, is in working order and is behaving as expected.  Anything else is deemed billable.

• Processing transactions, any input of data and general use of the system is the responsibility of the users. If you request a consultant to edit data / change the system on your behalf, this is deemed a billable request.  

On-site/Remote Consultants

These are our customer facing consultants who will assist onsite or remotely.   

• Engagement with on-site consultants are always billable. 
• This includes, but is not limited to, in person meetings whether at our office or yours, telephone meetings, Teams/Zoom meetings. 
• A penalty fee of 30 minutes of the consultants rate will be charged for missed appointments.
• Please note call-out fees for on-site visits are charged at R290.00 excluding VAT per trip.
• Billable work will be invoiced on a Friday.  
• All invoices are due by the close of business on the Tuesday following the week of issue.

Support Consultants

These are our support desk operators. Tickets are submitted to them through the Customer Portal or via email support@paradigmsoftware.co.za. When a ticket is submitted you will always be notified if the request falls under billable services and/or if an on-site consultant is required.

For billable support tickets, the policy is as follows:

• Should a request be estimated to take less than 2 hours, you will be notified, and we will ask for confirmation to continue with the request. Please note we have a minimum charge of 30min. 
• Should a request be estimated to take more than 2 hours, you will be notified, and we will ask for confirmation to continue with the request or if you would like us to provide a formal estimate.  
• Please note, scoping/investigations are billable at time spent.
• All quotes are an estimate and will be billed time spent.
• A penalty fee of 30 minutes of the consultants rate will be charged for missed appointments.
• The customer will be updated regarding the progress and the hours spent will be invoiced on a weekly basis on a Friday.
• All invoices are due by the close of business on the Tuesday following the week of issue.

For non-billable support tickets, we consider the following:

• If the request is to fix a view on the user interface, or give a screenshot describing a very specific process, that is not already part of our Knowledge Base, then we may consider it non-billable. 
• If the user requests us to do the work for them like processing of documents, or set up of users as examples, then it is billable.

Developers

These are our software developers who build and enhance the Paradigm application. The developers also build any custom features as per the spec provided by the consultant.  

• Developers are not customer facing and only communicate via the Support or On-site consultants. 
• Any time spent by a developer is billable unless we discover the issue originates from a defect in the standard Paradigm application.
• Developer work done for customers will be invoiced on a Friday.  
• All invoices are due by the close of business on the Tuesday following the week of issue.