Word Count with and without spaces

[Zakiya]

I'm a professional translator in Italy who bills according to the number of characters in the translated document. There's often a big difference between the number of characters with and without spaces, depending on the formatting. I wonder if anyone else out there has resolved this ethical dilemna of whether or not to include spaces in the calculation of the length

In other countries translations are billed according the number of words, but in Italy...

Thanks for any input regarding what exactly the word count counts

Zakiya