Attended Hours Against Deliverables
Paying for time and paying for output are different arrangements with different risks, and the choice determines whether monitoring is needed at all.
Proof of work exists because somebody is paying for hours. Change what is being bought and the question largely disappears.
The commercial question in “Attended Hours Against Deliverables” needs a record that both sides can read. When a client or contractor considers step-rate compensation structure for step rate compensation, project labels, billable rules and corrections should be agreed before the first tracked hour rather than reconstructed during a dispute.
Paying for hours
The client carries the risk of inefficiency: slow work costs them more.
For an independent reference relevant to “Attended Hours Against Deliverables”, consult the ILO working-time resources; compare its principles with the proposed contract, collection, access model and real review process.
Which creates the need to verify the hours, and monitoring follows.
Appropriate where the scope is genuinely unknown: open-ended support, research, ongoing maintenance.
Paying for output
The contractor carries the risk: slow work costs them margin.
No reason to verify hours, because hours are not what is being bought.
Appropriate where the work can be specified, which is more often than people assume.
Why hourly persists where it should not
Specifying work is effort, and the client has to do it.
Hourly feels flexible and defers the specification.
And platforms make hourly easy and fixed-price harder, which shapes the default more than anybody's analysis does.
The hybrid that works
Milestones with fixed amounts, on a schedule.
Scope agreed per milestone rather than for the whole project.
Which keeps the flexibility of hourly and removes the verification problem, and is what most experienced contractors propose.
When hourly is genuinely right
Work whose shape cannot be known in advance: debugging an unknown fault, exploratory research, responding to incidents.
A retainer for availability.
Pair programming or collaborative sessions where the hour is the unit of value.
In these the hour is the honest unit, and the question becomes how to establish it, which the evidence section covers.
The capped-hourly middle
Hourly billing with a ceiling agreed in advance.
The client's exposure is bounded, which removes most of the anxiety that monitoring was addressing.
And it costs nothing to agree — a sentence in the engagement.
What this means for monitoring
If the arrangement is fixed-price or milestone-based, screenshots serve no purpose and should not be requested.
If it is hourly, the question is which evidence is proportionate, and screenshots are one of several options and not the strongest.
Choosing the billing structure first makes the monitoring question much smaller, which is the practical conclusion of this section.
What to check
What are you actually buying — time or output?
Could the work be specified well enough for milestones?
Is there a cap?
And if the structure changed, would the monitoring still be wanted?