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Materials and travel don't come out of the package hours
By the end, you decide what part of a visit gets deducted from the hours balance and what gets charged separately, so the package doesn't get drained by costs that aren't your time.
By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026
An hour package only works if it's clear which part of each visit comes out of the balance and what gets billed separately. A customer with a ten-hour package calls you because the washer won't heat water. You go to their house, spend forty-five minutes diagnosing and fixing it, but the part you install (a thermostat) costs $18, and the drive to their house takes twenty-five minutes. If you deduct the full seventy minutes, drive time plus repair, from the balance, and then also bill the part in package hours, you're charging for gas and a part as if they were your own working minutes.
This happens with any hour package used outside a shop: house calls, maintenance, landscaping, electrical work. The package measures your work. It doesn't measure everything around a visit. If you don't separate the two from day one, each visit eats into a different amount of balance depending on the customer's luck, and that won't hold up when someone complains.
What the hours cover: only your work
The rule is simple: what comes out of the balance is the time you spend solving the customer's problem, diagnosing the issue, taking it apart, repairing it, putting it back together, and testing that it works. Materials, and travel if you charge for it, are billed separately, with their own price, and don't touch the balance. If you repair household appliances (a washer, a refrigerator), the regulation already splits it this way. Under the Royal Decree 58/1988, which applies wherever your region doesn't set its own rules, the invoice itemizes the replacement parts, the labor time spent, and, if you charge for it, the travel, each with its own amount.
The reason has to do with pricing, not bookkeeping. When you set the price for your package hour, you started from what your work is worth. You don't set the price of materials, whoever sells them to you does. For household appliance repairs, the same decree also requires that the part be billed at its retail price. If you fold that cost into the hourly rate, the hourly price stops being a useful reference for anything: a job ends up cheap or expensive depending on which part it needed, not on how much work you actually did.
And there's a case that always gets overlooked: wait time. If you order a part you don't have on hand and come back three days later to install it, those three days don't belong to you or the customer. Nobody's working during a wait, so nobody pays for it, not in package hours and not as a separate charge either. For individual consumers, the General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users treats as abusive any terms that bill for services that weren't actually used. And if you repair household appliances, that second visit doesn't let you charge another travel fee: the same decree says it's billed once, even if it takes more than one trip to finish the job.
Travel time: it's decided before you sell the package, not after
Travel is the odd case out: sometimes it's built into the hourly price and sometimes it's billed separately, and the choice depends on your service area, not on some general rule that applies to every trade.
If you work in a compact area (a neighborhood, a small town, an industrial park) and your drives usually run the same ten or fifteen minutes, you can fold that time into the hourly price. Every package customer pays a little extra for travel, but since the drive is about the same for everyone, nobody loses out compared to anyone else.
If instead you cover a large area (a whole city, several towns) and the drive ranges anywhere from ten minutes to an hour depending on who's calling, folding it into the hourly rate isn't fair: the customer who lives nearby ends up paying, in every hour of their package, for part of the road to the one who lives far away. The solution there is to charge a separate travel fee, flat or per mile, outside the package, the same for everyone calling from the same distance. And if you sell to individual consumers, that rate has to be disclosed before you sell the package: the General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users requires that, before the customer is bound, they clearly receive the financial terms: the total price or, if it can't be calculated in advance, how it's calculated, and any costs billed separately.
- Compact area, similar drive times for all customers
- One single price for the package, easier to sell
- The customer doesn't see a separate travel line item
- Wide area, drive times vary a lot by customer
- Each customer pays only for their own travel
- The package always measures the same thing, no matter where the caller lives
- You need a travel rate set before you sell your first package
Which one to choose: If your drive times are similar from one customer to the next, fold it in. As soon as the difference shows up in someone's wallet, bill it separately: that's the only way the package is worth the same to everyone who buys it.
Now you know what counts against the balance and what doesn't, and you have the template to put it in writing at every visit. What's left is how you explain it to the customer on the spot, so the deduction doesn't turn into an argument.
- The hour balance is only deducted for the time you spend solving the problem: diagnosis, repair, testing.
- Materials and parts are billed separately, at their own price, and never against the balance.
- Waiting time for an ordered part doesn't deduct hours either: nobody's working while they wait.
- Travel is decided once, based on how much it varies between customers: absorbed into the hour if the area is compact, charged separately if it's not.
- Every visit gets a written record of how much balance was used and what was charged outside the package.
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A customer with a package calls because their furnace is making noise. You go out, spend twenty minutes figuring out it needs a part you don't have on hand, then come back three days later and install it in fifteen minutes. How much do you deduct from their balance?
Thirty-five minutes, the time you actually worked across both visits. The three-day wait doesn't count: you weren't working for them, you were waiting on the part.
2. You sell landscaping packages in a city where some customers are downtown (eight minutes away) and others are in the suburbs (forty minutes away). Someone asks you to fold travel time into the hour to simplify the package. Do you do it?
No. With that kind of gap, folding travel into the hourly rate means the downtown customer pays, every hour, for roads they never drive. Charge a separate travel fee based on distance, and the package measures only gardening work for both of them.
3. A customer complains because you deducted a full hour for a visit where you only worked thirty minutes; the rest was spent waiting for a part to arrive from the warehouse. Are they right?
Yes. Only the thirty minutes of actual work should have come out of the balance. Waiting for the part isn't work: it doesn't come out of their hours and it isn't billed separately either.
Now you know what counts toward the deduction and what doesn't; the next step is making sure the customer can see it without having to ask you how much they have left.
Sources
- Royal Decree 58/1988, of January 29, on the protection of consumer rights in household appliance repair services. Official State Gazette (BOE), consolidated text, accessed October 2026.
- Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of November 16, approving the consolidated text of the General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users and other complementary laws. Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain's Official State Gazette), consolidated text, accessed October 2026.