BILLING CLIENTS WITH NOTHING TO HIDE
O’Bayley Communications built a 22-year reputation in Palm Springs on one principle: clients should always understand exactly what they’re paying for. Here’s how accurate time tracking turned that promise into a practice they could keep — every single month.
Most agencies apply a standard markup. Tim O’Bayley didn’t. From the day he opened O’Bayley Communications in Palm Springs, he made a deliberate decision to bill purely by time, because for his clients, it was the right thing to do.
After years working with nonprofits and in corporate marketing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tim relocated to Palm Springs and quickly discovered there was virtually no local marketing infrastructure for the clients he cared about most. So he built his own agency. One grounded in a simple ethical conviction about how clients should be treated.
“If somebody’s paying more for their ad buy than their creative work, that doesn’t mean it took me ten times as long to do the ad buy. We always felt billing by time was more fair.” — Tim O’Bayley, Founder, O’Bayley Communications
For nonprofit clients operating on constrained budgets, that distinction matters enormously. A markup-based model can obscure the true cost of each deliverable and make it nearly impossible for a client to understand what they’re actually paying for. Time-based billing, done well, creates a clear line between value delivered and dollars spent.
The Promise Behind the Invoice
Tim’s billing philosophy wasn’t just about fairness — it was a competitive differentiator. Over 22 years, O’Bayley Communications built a reputation as the go-to firm in a specialized market. Clients included community organizations and marquee events like Modernism Week, one of Palm Springs’ most prominent annual cultural gatherings.
When those clients received an invoice, Tim wanted them to be able to read every line and understand it. No vague summaries, no unexplained totals, no “just trust us” assumptions. That level of transparency, consistently delivered, became a hallmark of how the agency operated.
“I always felt like we were billing on time, but we needed to be able to prove it. I wanted to provide enough detail that clients would never see some big scary number and not be able to understand what it was.” — Tim O’Bayley
The philosophy was sound.
But as the agency grew,with multiple contractors, multiple clients, and increasing complexity, delivering that level of clarity became harder to maintain.
Behind the scenes, billing was becoming a manual, time-consuming process. Spreadsheets had to be collected, consolidated, checked, and reformatted every month. What clients saw as seamless transparency required hours of invisible effort to produce.
And more importantly, it introduced risk.
Without a centralized system, proving accuracy at a detailed level, the very thing Tim built his reputation on, became increasingly difficult.
To keep his promise to clients, Tim didn’t just need a philosophy. He needed a system that could support it.
That’s when everything changed.
With FunctionFox, time tracking became structured, detailed, and instantly accessible. What once took hours of manual work each month became a streamlined process — one that didn’t just save time, but reinforced the very trust O’Bayley Communications was built on. As highlighted in the case study, this shift eliminated hours of spreadsheet consolidation and created a single source of truth for every invoice.
Because in the end, transparency isn’t just about how you bill, it’s about whether you can stand behind every number you send.
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