Owner of company changes timesheet 11

[MetalFighter]

My timesheet is usually about 90-95% billable each week. However, I notice that after the owner of our company reviews timesheets for payroll, all my non-billable time has miraculously disappeared into the billable projects' time. Most times its rounding half hours up to full hours and things like that. But there are other times when whole hours are being added to a client's project that was actually time spent on non-billable tasks.

Is this ethical? I think I know the answer, but the owner is adamant that its fine.

 

[SLTA]

Obvious question - have you raised these concerns privately, and nicely and politely, with the owner?

 

[berkshire]

When you are running your own business, the so called overhead eventually has to be paid by a customer.
It is either included in the hourly rate, or it is directly billed to the customers account. There have been more fights, mis understandings , and squabbles over this simple fact than any other. Go to your boss and ask him how he would like you to account for your non productive time. If you get it right the first time, there should be no reason for him to alter your time sheet.
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor

 

[dik]

slta... I would suggest that that would be a really BAD move...

Dik

 

[beej67]

I'll go against the grain here for a bit.

It's unethical and possibly illegal if you're billing your client by the HOUR. If you're billing your client on a lump sum / % complete basis, then they're not getting charged any more in any case, and the only thing it does is kink your internal project accounting. Which may or may not be bad depending on your corporate culture.

I worked at two big consulting firms straight out of college, and both of my managers did this all the time, because that was the game each department played to try and show billability while still coming in at or under budget for their jobs. Sometimes you worked overtime and didn't bill it, sometimes you worked less than necessary and billed overhead to a project, sometimes you worked on one project and billed another. I didn't consider it unethical because the client was paying the same fee no matter what. So why did my PM do it? Raises and bonuses.

Once these Harvard Business School nitwits got a hold of engineering consultancy and started implementing the "billable hours" model to project tracking, they borked the whole industry up. Now a poor engineer who's slow and sloppy looks 100% billable, and a good fast complete engineer looks like he's lazing about, because he's "less billable." All the project tracking tools track hours, they don't track how fast your task goes in those hours, so the Corner Office guys don't have a clue who's good and who isn't. They look at the billability, and give the slow sloppy guy the raise and the bonus. So the PM or department manager has to monkey with the timesheets to try and show the Corner Office Harvard Nitwit the sorts of indicators he's looking for on the timesheet, to ensure that what should happen does happen with regards to hiring, raises, and promotions.

Every large company I've ever worked for has worked that way. And the fundamental flaw goes back to what I call "managing by hour" instead of "managing by task."

Is it falsifying data? Sure. Does it drive Ron up the wall? Sure. But you're tracking the wrong data. You should be tracking tasks, not hours, and correctness, not billability. The first step to getting your internal systems working properly is to sever the ties between "billability" and reward. And every big company I've ever worked in goes completely the opposite direction.



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[moltenmetal]

beej67: when asked by clients why we are so reluctant to do work on a T&M basis, I tell them that we don't have enough people, much less enough stupid people, to make money that way. When they laugh, and they usually do, you can see by the look on their faces that they understand this to be true based on previous experience doing work such as what we do on a T&M basis. The ones that don't laugh are going to be tough customers regardless how the contract is structured, and it's best to know that beforehand.

T&M is where many engineers live these days, and they have no choice in the matter. It's important that they play that game by the rules without committing fraud. Unfortunately, the hourly rate competition resulting from the T&M model has led in large part to the downfall of engineering from true profession to commodity in my opinion, even though it seems to be modelled after how other professions such as law often sell their services.

 

[dik]

sorry sita... misunderstood... I was thinking the 'client' and not the owner of the engineering firm... you are correct...

 

[lacajun]

If engineers are bright, and they are, why has the "profession" degraded to a commodity status?

If you don't have accurate accounting per project, which should be task oriented, you reach a point of not knowing how to bid projects because your estimates are inaccurate. I know of a large company that reached that point because of inaccurate accounting. They began losing bids rather than winning them. Executive management determined what was going on and put a quick and painful stop to it. They began to require strict accounting even down to not padding an expense report. Do engineers pad expense reports? Some do.

There are some plants that will fire people for falsifying company documents regardless of the document. They will fire for thievery. They fire for all sorts of things. I found that to be one of the best environments I worked in. Standards were high and most people rose to meet them.

Everything seeks the path of least resistance. Encouragement to do so just makes the human side of that worse.

 

[IRstuff]

Every large company I've worked strives for the "Earned Value" approach, but they don't often succeed, but that's another matter altogether.

Nonetheless, the cost account manager is graded on BOTH hours and progress. One or the other sliding immediately shows up as a variance that must be corrected.

While changing the billing may be justified and even necessary, to do that behind the back of the employee is just wrong, and makes a mockery of having him sign and certify his hours.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
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[SLTA]

it's all good dik

So, MetalFighter? What are you going to do?

 

[MetalFighter]

Just FYI....we work 100% on a T&M basis and bill by the HOUR. That's why I've suspected that this was wrong, but needed some other opinions.

 

[zdas04]

I've been avoiding this thread because I KNEW it was going to be chock full of "Quit!!", "Hire a Lawyer", "You're going to jail", because these kinds of threads always are. I wasn't "disappointed". My contracts say that I will round part hours up to full hours. So I would bet that the rounding part of the changes is a response to a formal or informal version of that. Moving time from non-billable to billable could be an intrepretation. Next time it happens, ask your boss "what are the ground rules here? I hate for you to have to spend so much time on my timesheet".

David

 

[patprimmer]

Most times its rounding half hours up to full hours and things like that. But there are other times when whole hours are being added to a client's project that was actually time spent on non-billable tasks.

David.

I agree that rounding up if declared in the contract is both common practice and ethical so long as it is understood that is the deal, however the part in the quote from the OP in bold was the part that tipped me over the line. Surely adding an hour or more is more than normal rounding up and is therefore deception unless that possibility is also part of the agreement for whatever reason.

At least it's not totaling up to 120% billable hours.

Regards
Pat
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[FreddyNurk]

I suspect the truth is somewhere between patprimmer's and zdas04's suggestions, but I fully expected that as soon as I read the OP's description, that it was a location that billed by the hour.

I used to work for a mining services company that had contractual arrangements for service, with most charges based around an hourly rate with some disbursements.

One of the arrangements was a minimum 1 day (10 hour) charge for certain client, of which some jobs had an actual work duration of 1.5 hours. Often transport time came into it, but I was aware of a few instances where two clients were charged minimum fees for the one operator managing two 1.5 hour jobs in the one day. As far as I was aware the clients were happy with this, as ethically unstable as it may have been. This experience to me supports what zdas04 stated.

However, I tend to lean towards the consideration that theres no benefit in the boss altering timesheets without a benefit to the company, earned or otherwise. Rounding up of hours can be carried out by admin staff with a papertrail.

If its an hourly rates engagement, the client has every right to enquire as to the amount of hours spent against work produced. In such a position I'd be quite wary as well.

 

[rowingengineer]

Question has the boss done this or has the admin, do you know for certain whom is to blame??? have you seen the boss make the changes?

How could you do anything so vicious? It was easy my dear, don't forget I spent two years as a building contractor. - Priscilla Presley & Ricardo Montalban

 

[zdas04]

By "interpretation" I meant that different people see things differently. I recently spent 2 hours with the new eng-tips search engine trying to answer a client's question. I was unsuccessful and didn't bill the time to them. Later I stumbled on the answer in eng-tips.com and was able to provide it to my client. Originally, I was satisfied eating an unproductive dead end. When I proved to myself that the answer really was here, I was very comfortable moving the hours from non-billable to billable. I feel that an unproductive literature search that never finds the information for the client's project is "training", but a literature search that results in improving a result for a client is billable. Personally I don't bill unproductive searches, but I bill every minute (rounded up in total to whole hours) for productive searches. Often the unproductive-search hours will sit in "training" for weeks until a productive search for the same information yields pay dirt, then the unproductive stuff moves out of training.

Maybe it is unethical, but I've discussed it with clients and all of them feel that I'd be justified billing them for the time spent searching even if it never produced fruit.

David

 

[moltenmetal]

David: most people in your situation would bill them for any time spent working on their problem, even if the result was "sorry, I've looked into it and regret that I can't help you". That makes it simple. What you're doing is fairer than that, and I'm sure your clients appreciate the fair treatment.

 

[IRstuff]

David, I have no qualms about anything you personally do with your own hours and how you bill them, since they are your own work and you know what you did better than anyone else could.

What I would question is how you might change hours for one of your subordinates without asking exactly how the hours were spent on "nonbillable" work. This is the one part of the OP's that remains unanswered. Unless you, as the manager, shadowed your engineer during the 40 hours in question, what basis would you have to determine where to bill the hours, particularly without input from the employee? If the boss came to the employee and asks, "Why are these hours nonbillable," and they both come to an agreement that there was an error or incorrect interpretation, then all would be acceptable procedure. The employee would make the change and re-certify his hours accordingly. Now, it might still be mischarging, because they both were in error, but it wouldn't be a criminal act, unless they knew they were mischarging.

So, for me, the issue is the backhandedness of the changes, and the blatant repudiation of the OP's certification that the hours were indeed "nonbillable." Both of these are serious failures in management, at the very least.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
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[zdas04]

It's not about "fair", I just figure if my clients wanted to pay for unproductive work they would have stayed with the big firms.

We don't know what categories were changed, my point was that there are times that different people see the same thing differently. If the category was "looking at U-Tube Porn", then one person might see it as "training" and another might see it as preparation for the screwing they were going to get for being late.

David

 

[btrueblood]

Hm. Watching vibrating element flowmeters just doesn't do it for me, zdas. Just sayin'.

 

[patprimmer]

Surely it depends on the deal with the client.

I have had 3 different deals running simultaneously.

1) $200.00/hour for time at his site rounded up to 15 min, no travel time, no training time other than actually investigating the problem and directly accessing very specific technical data there and then. Only billed for at the workface hours not even coffee breaks etc.

2) $80.00/hour for all time, including travel and speculative research. The research might confirm there is no solution to the problem, but it is still billed, including coffee breaks etc.

3) $40.00/hour for a guaranteed retainer to be on call for 20 hours a month whether or not work is even done. Some of the time can be done for other projects when not called. This was unusual and complicated as it cut short and replaced an existing contract where commissions would have been due anyway. If they used no time, they still got billed 20 hours. If they used 40 hours they got billed 40 hours at $40/hour. If they used 60 hours they got billed 40 at $40 and 20 at $80/hour, including travl time, coffee breaks etc.

Bottom line, each was agreed with the client and billed accurately according to that specific agreement.

If billed according to the agreement, then they are in fact billable hours.

Regards
Pat
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