timesheet creativity?

[expat]

From CUK article:

"It is very tempting to always round up to the nearest fifteen minutes." Over the course of an 18-month contract, he admits this could amount to a few weeks’ pay.

1. Really? Not in the arithmetic I did at school.

2. Is that wrong? Is it wrong to round up to the nearest 5 minutes? 1 minute? 1 second......

[DimPrawn]

Round down to the nearest month. It's only "fair".

PS. I get paid on a day rate. This is a growing trend. Very hard to cheat on your timesheet then.

[thunderlizard]

Try hiring the likes of Accenture and getting them to round up to anything less than half a day for scrappy bits of support.

[Not So Wise]

1. Really? Not in the arithmetic I did at school.

If you don't take into account that some of the working days in that 18 month period might be holidays that 15 mins per day works out at about 90 hours in that 18 month period. Well over 2 weeks of "money for nothing"

But tbh thats nothing compared to the money companys lose in not having things ready and in place when the contractor starts. Either it's waiting for equipment, network ID's (walked on on a contract a few years ago when after 3 weeks they still had not sorted me out a pc) or just plain politics that is the most costly waste they incur. Like on my current contract i am 3 weeks into it, they wanted me to start straight away (day after the interview) and I have spent those 3 weeks more sitting on my hands waiting for the politics to be sorted than doing any real work and the same has happened on 90% of the contracts i have done over the years.

To keep in line with with the trademan comparisons of the article, it's akin to hireing painters on an hourly rate before the first wall is put up

So why is the fixed price contract not more prevalent in IT? It would protect the client, instil a sense of urgency in the contractor and assign IR35 to the dustbin.

And the above is the exact reason majority of contracts for larger companys are not for fixed price, because majority of contractors would go bankrupt within a year because of the clients lack of urgency unless they charged the crazy rates consultancys do to make up for it.

Even smaller companys are rife with this and it is one of the main reasons i stoped this year doing fixed price work and went back to normal hourly rates

[AtW]

Solicitors that I used were rounding every phone call and email up to 6 minutes - it now transpired that this is standard practice for them.

[expat]

If you don't take into account that some of the working days in that 18 month period might be holidays that 15 mins per day works out at about 90 hours in that 18 month period. Well over 2 weeks of "money for nothing"

I did the same calculation (like you I considered it as simply adding on a full 15 mins every day, though you could say it would add on a maximum of 14 mins every day, but more likely an average of 7.5). That 90 hours is 2 weeks 10 hours on a standard 40-hour week, not what I'd call "a few weeks" but I suppose one could.

But that's max. That's why I couldn't suppress the sarky comment. To say it could amount to a few weeks of money for nothing is akin to saying that a contractor on 50/hour "earns" in excess of 100k per year (most of us have seen this one, sometimes from the other party's solicitor!). Fun but let's not take it seriously.