Which rate did you agree with this client?
One card per language pair and specialization, attached to the client who accepted it, so that question becomes a lookup instead of an excavation through two years of email.
The agreement is what goes missing, not the number
The rate for the client you worked for last week is easy; you can recite it. It is the one from fourteen months ago that evaporates. The medical card that sits above the general card for the same pair. The minimum you talked them up to over three emails. The rush terms you only ever agreed on a phone call. When an agency queries a figure, the disagreement is almost never about arithmetic; it is about which of the two of you remembers the agreement correctly, and the one who wrote it down wins.
What one card fixes in place
A card is not a single number, which is why keeping them in a spreadsheet column stops working somewhere around the fourth client. Each one holds:
- A per-word rate for every one of the seven match bands, from new words down to context matches.
- An hourly rate, for revision, review and the jobs that arrive as a scanned document.
- A minimum charge, so a fifty-word certificate bills at what setting it up actually costs.
- Rush multipliers at 125, 150 or 200 percent, or a custom figure where you agreed something else.
- The source language, the target language, the specialization, and the currency the card is written in.
Attached to a client, after which it stops being a decision
A card attaches to the clients who accepted it, so a project opened for one of them already knows what it is worth and quoting reduces to counting words. Several clients can share a card where they agreed identical terms; one client can hold several, one per pair or one per subject. Raising a figure at renewal raises it in a single place and the next project quotes at the new one, while invoices already issued keep the figure that was agreed when they were issued. That is the behavior you want the first time somebody asks why last quarter cost them less.