What a shorter schedule actually buys
Three things, and it is worth being exact about which. The distinction is what makes a rush quotation honest or not.
It buys queue position. An editor with six weeks of committed work who takes a job due in ten days is displacing something, and the premium is partly the cost of that displacement.
It buys hours per day. A manuscript that would have been read across four weeks gets read across nine, at more hours a day, and there is a limit past which more hours stop producing more findings.
It does not buy a faster reading. The reading speed of a careful editor is what it is. The EFA's rate chart makes that visible, because reading the per-word and per-hour columns together for any level of work implies a pace, and the pace does not move with a date.2
That third point is the one worth taking. A compressed schedule changes when the work happens. It does not change how long the work takes.
What gets dropped first, and what should
Something is always removed to fit a shorter schedule. The useful question is whether the client chose it or discovered it afterward.
Editors Canada's fundamentals ask an editor to understand how the scope of a project shapes the work, including the level of editorial intervention requested or required, and to negotiate and clarify that scope before starting.3 On a rush job that negotiation is not a formality. It is the whole arrangement.
Four things are commonly dropped, in roughly this order. The second pass over material already edited. The verification of quotations, figures, and cross-references against sources. The style sheet, or its completeness. And the queries, which get resolved by the editor rather than referred to the author.
The first three are losses a client may reasonably accept. The fourth is different, because an editor resolving rather than querying is making decisions the author would have made, and on some documents that is not acceptable at any speed.
When to say no to your own deadline
Two situations are worth naming, because in both the money spent produces nothing useful. Both are recognizable before anyone is hired.
The first is a manuscript that is not finished. The EFA's guide advises completing or substantially shaping a manuscript before looking for professional editing.1 Chapters arriving after an edit has begun are edited to a different standard from the chapters already done, and on a compressed schedule there is no time to reconcile them.
The second is a document that needs a different level of work from the one the schedule allows. Editors Canada records that proofreading is not a substitute for editing.4 A structural problem discovered eight days before a deadline is still a structural problem, and buying a proofread instead produces a correctly punctuated version of it.
In both cases the honest answer is to move the deadline, reduce the scope deliberately, or accept a known limitation in writing. All three are better than discovering the limitation afterward.
What to put in the arrangement
Four things belong in it, and they take five minutes to agree.
What is being dropped to meet the date, named rather than implied. What happens to the price and the date if material arrives late. Whether queries will be raised or resolved. And what the client gets if the schedule proves impossible, which is a question worth answering while everyone is still calm.
EditFast quotes on the whole document and states which level of work the figure covers. Where a date cannot be met without reducing the scope, we say so before the work starts. Estimates are free and carry no obligation, and what each level covers is published. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, business documents, and correspondence.
An author with a genuinely fixed date has one useful move available before calling anyone. Count the words, and decide in advance which of the four things above they are willing to lose. That conversation takes ten minutes at the start and cannot be had at all in the last week.