Management Started Asking For Highly Detailed Timesheet, So An Employee Followed The New Policy To The Letter Got One Paid Day Off Every Week

Heather Hall

5 days ago

If you’ve ever had to fill out a timesheet, you know how time consuming and pointless it can seem.

That’s why the following story is so satisfying. Because sometimes you can read between the lines of a silly policy and win big.

Let’s take a look!

Another timesheet drama

Hey!

I have a friend who works for digital agencies doing analytics for Fortune 500 Corps. Let’s call him Dan. And usually those agencies don’t do much more than proxying the contractor and surcharging a percentage on every hour.

They actually rarely contribute anything to the work process or end product. They sometimes wouldn’t even have a PM/Account manager involved. They would just literally resell the contractor.

And usually those agencies are smart enough to shut the heck up and not bother the client or the contractor. They know that they actually have no reasonable justification for the surcharge.

Some companies feel the need to change policies … even when they work.

Well, in this case, Dan’s agency (I think it was Cardinal Path at the time) suddenly started asking for more detailed timesheets. You see, most senior contractors usually won’t bother.

They would have some generic one-liner like: “worked” and 8hrs charged towards that. Because it’s not really worth it to go and detail everything.

The client would know what work the contractor would have done anyhow, so they would approve the timesheets if they don’t exceed the weekly limit, which is 40 hours usually.

In business, you must be careful what you ask for.

My friend, of course, pushed back and asked the client whether they needed that level of detail.

The client had no problems with the timesheets whatsoever, and when he raised it with the agency’s manager, they informed him that it was a new corporate policy or something to that extent.

Well, Dan had to comply. And he started charging the agency for it. He started adding time expenses unrelated to the client work.

Stuff the agency casually got used to getting for free: two-factor authentications, trashy corporate mass-emails, any kind of correspondence with the agency staff like accountants, account managers, PMs, IT; useless recurring learning courses, etcetra, etcetra and, of course, the time wasted on timesheets.

This worked out to Dan’s advantage.

In total, it would have been anywhere from four to eight hours/week. He effectively got himself almost one whole paid day off.

He told the client that his capacity on Fridays would have been lessened due to the new rules the agency pushed, so he blocked the whole day to avoid any meetings. That would effectively leave his whole Friday to himself.

The client actually kinda liked it cuz Fridays were half days off normally for their regular staff, plus no production releases were allowed on Fridays anyhow, but they couldn’t enforce the half-days on contractors.

It also worked out better for the client but not the agency.

And basically what it meant to the client is that they would have to pay less to the agency for Fridays.

Now, not only did the agency lose 4-8 hours/week of their profit, but they now introduced an expense cuz those 4-8 hours they lost suddenly became a liability that they had to pay for cuz these hours were billable, of course.

Dan’s hour back then was over $100, but let’s just pretend it was a hundred per hour. The agency likely charged at least double, so $200/h.

So the net difference would have been $100*6h = $600 from their net revenue plus $100*6h that they would have to pay out of their own pocket. $1200/week.

Not bad. It seems a reasonable cost for a more detailed timesheet, eh?

Here it comes.

They freaked out.

There was a lot of back and forth.

In the end… What? You think they removed the requirement? You haven’t worked much for bureaucracies, eh?

No, they just went with it, lulz.

My dear friend worked there for another year, effectively having Fridays off, and then left the agency when they started pushing new corporate contracts onto the contractors.

The bureaucracy always has to win.

And the new contracts were kinda unreasonable. Asked for some odd things, one of which would be to fill the timesheets immediately after a given task was completed.

Heh.

He pushed back, but the director at the agency claimed they couldn’t change anything in the contracts since these new contracts were coming from Dentsu, the parent agency that would have apparently acquired Cardinal Path around that time.

Wow! Some companies obviously don’t mind wasting money.

Let’s see how the readers over on Reddit reacted to this story.

This person makes an excellent point.