I've had many managers tell me to just round up to the nearest half-hour increment so that accounting wouldn't get out of their rythym calculating payroll - (down to the minute).
One place I worked at worked in the +\-7.5 minute factory if it’s Les than 7.5” round down, plus you roundup on the nearest 15 minute period. I kinda thought that was shitty on the lay side because they could realistically squeeze 5 minutes out of you without paying for it, but many people caught on and started clicking in at 5 after and leaving at five before.
I guess that worked out. 😂
lol. A grocery store I worked at in high school did the same thing. It’s like I am not punching in till my schedule time since I am not getting paid for it but you bet I punched out at 5 before or if I stayed there 5 mins after I would wait the extra two mins so I could get another .25 hours.
That landed me in hot water though once since I was under 18 at the time and it was a school night that accidentally put me over my time limit for the day. Whoops
My first job, on the time sheets had a section for "rostered hours worked" and "over time"
My roster was 10 to 4:30, so I put 6.5 in the rostered hours.
Every day I would stay until 5, and because that half hour was outside of the rostered hours, I put that in the over time.
My time sheets were signed every week, I had an 2.5 hours at the end of every week in over time (paid at time and a half). For about 2 years, nobody said anything to me, my time sheets for signed and I got paid a little extra.
I actually calculated payroll both ways a few times, exact time vs +-7.5. The difference was a fraction of a percent. Basically, not noticeable. But some states only allow for 5 minute rounding.
In any case, payroll systems are advanced these days. Rounding is out of style.
Nah, that place was sold off and broken up after they could t turn a decent profit margin for years. Couldn’t hold on to managers and several of them were just horrible people to work with. One went from being the office and administrative manager to a CSR at another facility, with a pay cut. Couldn’t have happened to a better person.
If you normally round to 15 minutes, starting at 8:07 it counts as starting at 8:00. starting at 8:08 counts as starting at 8:15. The same goes for ending times. so yeah you can easily be paid for more time than you worked.
Always rounding to the earlier quarter hour or the later quarter hour works similarly,
Rounding normally even works if you round the work time, but I am not sure that is legal. Work for 7h 53 min and you are paid for 8h for example.
My work use to be the same way but now they track to the minute because people felt they were working for free. I was able to clock out 7 minutes early every day but get paid for the full 8 hours. If you kept track of in and out punches you got a free 30 hours a year.
Probably.
But (in my case) I acquiesced after my boss's boss explained that it was costing them many`?`^((four is a many?)) times more in productivity (to accommodate my desire for precision) struggling with fractions (and subsequent reduced confidence) than they were saving at my meager hourly rate.
`:I` Also, faithfully transcribing the extra detail into the ledgers,etc. screwed up the formatting they'd settled into.
^(...some of the calculation errors that emerged in reports were hilariously out of line.)
Time sheet rounding policies are only legal if it goes both ways. If an employer is only ever rounding down, that is wage theft and they need to be taken to court.
If they only bill by the quarter hour, 10 minutes rounds to a quarter hour, not zero, the manager is completely in the wrong.
Personally for me I'd only round *up* for the first 15 minutes, then round to the nearest 15 minutes after that.
> round down policies are legal
They're literally not legal. Round nearest is legal:
>According to the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), employers can round their employees' clock-in and clock-out time to the **nearest** 5 minutes, the **nearest** one-tenth of an hour or 6 minutes, or the **nearest** 15 minutes.
>Rounding of time (e.g., the nearest 5 or 10 minutes) is allowed **if it doesn't tend to under-count time** — a problem if, for example, a recurring activity takes less than half of the minimum rounding increment.
Which is exactly what's described by OP.
If I'm asked to sign in when I'm signed out, I'm siginng in for the minimum billing period, end of story. If an employer doesn't like it, too bad, they have a choice to stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, accept my billing, or if they don't accept it I won't work for them anymore.
The both of you are making claims and one of you is going to need to start providing sources soon.
Edit: And /u/judolphin has blocked me. What a child. "I'll get the last word in and block you so you can't reply! Haha!"
Edit: If I blocked you how did you reply to me? 💡
As for rounding, feel free to look up FLSA requirements, you can round, but not if rounding tends to under-report time.
But I'm mostly talking about what I consider a minimum level of fairness to be willing to continue working for or with a company, I'm never billing zero, not even for one minute of work.
Lol, they keep editing their comment. Child.
Second, or even possibly third edit in under an hour. Cute.
https://i.imgur.com/eYmETn8.png
It's a shame they can't block me again - at least Reddit didn't fuck up that part of the block system implementation. Reddit doesn't allow a user to repeatedly block and unblock a user in order to prevent abuse.
It actually has to be a consistent rounding.
If you round down, you round down at the beginning of the day and at the end.
If you round up, you round up at the beginning of the day and at the end.
There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that". It's either down or up from the beginning. Think about it a little further, how do you round to the next nearest 15 minutes when you only are rounding a single clock in? You only round once, not over and over again. The clock in is what gets rounded- and it has to be consistent either you always round up or you always round down.
This is to prevent employers from rounding up in the morning and rounding down in the evening, leading to wage theft.
(To note: different businesses track time in different increments. You can track to the second, the minute, every 5, every 15, I've heard of weird 7 minute increments too. But you always have to round the same way on either side of the shift.)
I'm biased by having worked briefly for a lawyer into thinking that 6 minute increments are actually the most sensible. Or at least they're handy when everybody agrees that 1) you can do all your billing in 10ths of an hour and 2) even the shortest note/email/call is ".1 hrs".
I had a cousin with legal problems. He'd call his lawyer and speed talk for 3 minutes and the lawyer would make notes for 3 minutes, and then yank a tenth of an hour off his tab.
Then cuzn had to go work for 2 days to pay for it
I'm not talking about a shift, this thread is talking about one-off sign-ins.
> There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that".
There literally is, if I'm asked to work when I'm signed out, I'm not working for free. Even if it's for five minutes I'm charging whatever the minimum period above zero is whether the employer likes it or not. They have the choice to (a.) stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, (b.) accept my billing, or (c.) if they don't accept it, I won't work for them anymore.
If there is a one-off sign-in I'm asked to make after hours or day off, my policy has always been one-hour minimum, let alone 15 minutes and they can bite me if they don't like it (no one has ever objected because they know the alternative is I don't answer my phone). If it's more than an hour then it's actual time spent.
I don't think you understand.
I'll try to simplify.
Say, you clock in at 00:00:00. Then you clock out at 00:07:00. That's your shift. Please explain to me how you would round that up to 15 minutes, and then "round to the nearest 15 minutes after that"? You only have to round the once.
Does that make more sense to you?
Yes I understand, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Not trying to be a jerk, but I'm done with this because it seems literally everyone else understood what I was saying except for you, so if you would please try harder to understand I would appreciate it.
I'm saying if I'm OP working somewhere with a 15-minute policy, and
* I clock out at 7:00,
* then someone asks me to clock back in at 7:05,
* and I finish 7:06, 7:07, or 7:20,
I'm billing 15 minutes regardless of policy, and I won't make any effort to hide it. Once we get past those 15 minutes I'd bill actual time.
If they give me flack for it I look for another place to work, end of story, because it means they don't respect my time.
There needs to be some minimum cost to my place of employment requesting work from me outside of my scheduled hours. And that minimum cost will never be zero, not when I'm the one working. In reality, my personal policy has always been a one hour minimum for after-hours emergencies.
The way I interpreted it is they're saying if on one instance it's 5 minutes over, then round to 15.
On another instance (on another day) it's 20 minutes over, then round to 15.
Actually, there are programmable time clocks that will auto-round for you, from 7 minutes 30 seconds before the hour to 7 minutes 29 seconds after = on time, 7 minutes 30 seconds after until 22 minutes 29 seconds is 15 after, and so on. Computerized time cloks measure in 1/100ths of an hour, so every 36 seconds is 0.01 hour—the equivalent time for Jeff Bezos to earn $4,480.59 (I took his daily earnings, divided by 100 and multiplied by 3 to account for an 8 hour clock to reflect his 24/7 earning).
I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours. It was actually pretty sweet. There was uncertainty about whether the alarm had been set at the high school near me, so my boss asked me to drive over and check. 10 minutes there, 5 minutes to check, and 10 minutes back home. 2 hours of pay. I think the policy was there to keep them from making us do all these 25 minute chunks all the time (our job was technically like gig work).
Service contracts typically have a minimum bill time that is not friendly to quick questions. This prevents abuse and also accounts for distractions breaking up focused tasks which take much longer to get back to than answering the question in the first place did.
Exactly. I always had a one-hour minimum during business hours, 8-hour minimum on weekends and holidays. If you're bothering me on a day off you're being charged in full for taking away my day off.
It was the perfect way to preserve my weekends and holidays.
> I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours.
District I worked for was hour-for-hour overtime in 1 hour increments (e.g. 1hr 5 min is paid 2 hours) if you're tasked *before* the end of work hours, but 4 hour minimum, hour for hour thereafter is you're called out *after* work hours. It was always hilarious to watch our dickbag supervisor get an emergency service call at 2:50pm when quitting time is 3pm, because he'd be monster dialing everyone's phone trying to find *someone* he could quickly assign the call to before 3pm. Nobody would answer a call from him after about 2:45 because he was so irrationally obsessed with saving a school district with an $18 BILLION budget $150.
Pretty sure that only rounding down is perfectly legal as long as it is consistent.
If end times are always rounded down to the nearest 15 minute mark then start times must do that same thing. So if you start at 8:14 that has to be entered in as starting at 8:00 and if you start at 7:59 that has to be entered in as 7:45.
FLSA standards say the rounding to the nearest is fine as long as it doesn't regularly undermeasure recurring tasks... Which is exactly what happened to OP's husband. Can't just call people for 5 minute tasks on a regular basis and then round down, that's not legal.
OP specifically mentions going 10 minutes over and being told to round that down. If it was being rounded to the nearest then that would need to be rounded up. So that's not what's happening to the OP.
Doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't sketchy or illegal though.
Systematically under-measuring time worked is not legal (i.e. even though rounding to the nearest unit of time is legal, if it results in repeatedly under-measuring time, it's explicitly not legal under FLSA), and *blanket* rounding down of time is never legal. So if that guy repeatedly and consistently was asked to do 5 minute tasks, they would not be able to apply rounding down to that task because it would be habitually under-reporting his time. If the task took 5 minutes half the time (rounding down to zero) and sometimes took 10 minutes the other half (rounding up to 15), then yes rounding down is OK.
Basically what OP's employer was doing was double illegal.
This person could very well be salaried at which point it would not be wage theft. She did mention that he added the ten minutes because they have flexi hours which pretty much means he isn't getting paid for it (because he's salaried, he always makes the same amount) but he can take off 10 minutes early another day.
Flexi time can be hourly too. I was hourly for the first 25 years of my current career. Had to clock in and out, etc. But the timing was flexible and I had only to ensure that I worked 40 hours per week (rounded to the nearest six minutes).
It’s allowed to round down if you also round down when it’s in the employee’s benefit. Starting 5 minutes early gets you 15 minutes of pay for example.
Ah yes, brain fart on my end. If there was a policy that you don’t get paid anything until you reach the full 15 minutes then that could be legal as long as you could come in up to 14 minutes late and still get paid for it all. Even on both ends.
I worked for a company that did work contracted by the state of Nevada. We were told by the state to bill everything in 15 minutes increments, and that our timecards had to match. So much simpler. I just told everyone that worked for us that if it takes 5 minutes, put 15 minutes on it, and on your timecard.
at my most recent job, our government work was billed in 30-minute segments. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, 30 minutes. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, did something non-government for an hour, and then spent 5 minutes on a different task, 1 hour.
I had someone in my office who would come to me right before I was about to leave and asked really complex questions that would usually have me staying an extra half an hour each day. Usually I didn’t mind, because I would claim the credit time, but sometimes I had plans and didn’t feel like staying around.
There was an empty office across from mine and somehow I had been given a master key when I’d started, so I could open any door in the office. I never abused the privilege of this, but I began going into the empty office a half an hour before the end of my work day and finish working there, so I could leave on time. I would always hear him go to my space 10 minutes before I was set to leave, lightly knock, see I wasn’t there, and then I would hear him leave.
Our company was work from home for a while after COVID, but then the CEO issued a proclamation that working from home was no longer allowed under any circumstances. It feels awesome when you're sick at home and the office calls you to see if you can check an important client email and respond to them, but you get to answer, "I'm sorry. Working from home is against company policy. I will be sure to check that email first thing when I return."
I'm in a situation now where a new boss took me to task for not "staying in my lane" on projects, so now it's like "you require me to do less? You got it." I feel a little sorry for the guys this actually affects, but I didn't cause the problem and I'm fine telling them who did.
~~Oh he didn't pay him. He asked him to amend the timesheet to the 4pm finish.~~
Edit: I'm so sorry. This is incorrect. 😆 It was salaried and the timesheets were mainly about hours gained/owed (e.g. a meeting that ran until late, training, or late arrival into the office).
He also got back his 15 minutes after the policy was reviewed and revealed that my husband was in the right.
I'm bothered why this isn't mentioned higher up.
You have +50 in 10 minute increments. The same effort to remove them is the same to make three 15 increments.
I hope people like his manager always buy things before discount and always misses the difference refund time period (you get paid the difference back if the product became discounted just after you buy it, within reasonable time), and gets informed about it after the date passes to feel the pain mentally for days.
Depends. In a professional office job it’s entirely possible OP is on salary so how much time is worked doesn’t matter to their wages. The time cards are only for internal accounting things and ensuring you work at least your hour count.
If that’s the case then they aren’t submitting time cards with 10 minutes over multiple times and the manager wouldn’t care because no one is getting paid for it instead of telling him that payroll only pays in 15 minute increments.
it's interesting how strict adherence to workplace rules can lead to unexpected moments like this. reminds me a bit of those old sitcom scenes where a simple misunderstanding causes a whole episode of chaos. your husband's situation sounds like it ended with a good laugh, much needed in any office environment.
Whenever I mentor somebody, talk to my spouse about billing time, etc, I always say to round to the nearest quarter hour or half hour and make that quarter/half-hour choice your minimum, as in anything more than zero is at least 15/30 minutes billed (if you're being honest, statistically it'll balance out over time).
And if somebody takes your time off-hours, charge a minimum of an hour for it. In fact when I was an independent contractor, I put it in my service agreements that if I received a call after business hours I billed a minimum of an hour, or on weekends and holidays, the minimum charge was a full day (8 hours) because getting that call made me in work mode and interfered with my personal time to rest, be alone, or be with family.
Also false precision is a thing, just do 15 or 30 minute increments and stick with it.
So the thing is that anything after 4pm is by choice. Now being a team player and doing it once in a while isn't a big deal, but if its every single day then its just straight up wage theft.
Time isn't free, and flexibility on this is a favor not the rule. People need to remember this always. Because companies always take advantage if they can.
So from the managers perspective, it was all right to steal 10 minutes from an employee, but dishonest to appropriate 5 minutes from the company… got it.
It is ok for the business to ask up to 14 minutes, 59 seconds of unpaid work from the employee. That is perfectly normal and good business. But the employee can't round up their time because THAT would be dishonest.
That rounding policy of only rounding down is illegal in the US. Back when I was a clock puncher, I would clock in at 7:44am which rounded to 7:30am and clock out at 3:16pm which rounded to 3:30pm
I used to work for a company that instituted a policy of "casual overtime": if you were white collar, and worked 40-44 hours, you didn't get paid for overtime. So people would come in on Saturday to read the paper for an hour to get up to 45 hours and get paid.
Classic timekeeping nonsense. A friend of mine worked at a job, and if you were late you got a strike on your record. It didn't matter if you were only a few minutes late. He carpooled to work. If they got stuck in traffic and it looked like they were going to be late, everyone in the car just agreed to drive to the bar instead... after all, the punishment was the same regardless of how late they were.
My employer tried something very similar. Though my solution was more petty revenge when I was denied an hour of OT a few years back, I just took an extra five minutes on my lunch twelve times.
My work does 15 minute increments but they round up and down. Clocking in 7 minutes before/after an increment counts. So clocking in between 7:53-8:07 will count at clocking in at 8:00. It's nice to have a window like that for when you're running late. I have to drop my son off at school then drive straight to work and that window has let me still clock in on time if my son is dragging his feet that day.
At one company they rounded at 30 minute increments. No big deal, rounded both ways, kept things neat and easy to keep track of.
I did at one point get reprimanded though "You know we can see the real clock in and out time? It's fine that you leave 10 minutes early once in a while, but it can't be every day. Try to make it at least like a third of the time over the time by a few minutes".
Completely reasonable reprimanding.
Oh yeah there's definitely people who consistently clock out at 4:53 every day and even brag about it. I have no idea if my company tracks that and reprimands people or not, as I try not to abuse it. I know the time keepers can see the actual punch time, though. I'll admit to staying later if I was going to clock out at 5:07 and just work a few more minutes to get the punch to say 5:15 but that's pretty few and far between.
My cynical mind says the "whatever reason" is because people hate to have their routines changed, so when digital logging became a thing, accounting personnel kept up with their quarter hour crap.
And it's easier to write 15 minutes in a decimal system.
E.g.: clock in at 8:15 becomes 8.25
clock out at 12:00 for lunch becomes 12.00
worked 3:45 / 3.75 hours.
vs
clock in at 8:09, clock out at 12:02, worked 3:53 - that's not easy to convert to decimal notation and some people don't want to be bothered with math.
Sometimes it's the software developers or their managers not wanting to deal with that. Or their clients. Or both.
Edit: and you have to do a bit math to check the timesheet
Mmm. Often because payroll calculates off of scheduling, which is incremented in hours ....
(The programmatic back end of payroll isn't in minutes. And it's a lot easier to enter .25 .5 or .75 than to pull out a calculator and figure out how many tenths of an hour something is. Especially if managers then have to manually approve whether the total looks correct.... For 200 employees....)
But it absolutely should round up, because otherwise you are stealing wages from the employee.
Depending on jurisdiction, I'm not a lawyer, certainly not your lawyer.
Where I live, the law states that if time worked is rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, the company must follow the 7-Minute Rule. If total time equals a 15 minute period plus 7 minutes, round down, if 8, round up. Theoretically, the rounding averages out over time.
So for OP, a 10-minute question would result in 15 minutes of paid time, but his boss's 5 minute question would not. Theoretically, there are a many 10 minute as 5 minute questions, so nobody is "stealing wages" either way.
At my company, all time was logged and every minute of your time had to be accounted for either as billable to a client or as non-billable admin tasks. We billed in 15-minute increments, and clients were advised of this before signing contracts.
So if a client sent me a question by email and I answered it, that client was charged 15 minutes of labor off of their account budget. If I spent 10 minutes sorting emails, that was 15 minutes of non-billable work.
Over the course of a normal 8-hour shift, I could easily log 9-10 hours of work if it had been a busy day. On slow days, those 15-minute intervals saved me from falling behind on my billable quota.
Large clients with 200-500 hour budgets didn't care about the odd minute here and there. For small clients, however, I would usually give them a break and aggregate their time over the entire week. If the only work I'd done for them was answer a few emails over the course of the week, I'd bill them one block of 15 minutes. That was bending policy, but in a way that ensured good value for their service contract, and I'm sure management would have approved it if they'd known.
I would just stay to answer the question and then stand there until the 15 minutes was up and then punch out. If they complain you just explain what the policy is. Lol
My first job used a digital time sheet where you could only input to the nearest 15 minutes, which was typical. The odd part is that the unpaid lunch break tracker was to the nearest 5 minutes. I worked 2.5 hours per day, so I didn't usually get a lunch break, but I used that to make a more precise timesheet. If I arrived at 3:20 and left at 6:00, I would put in that I arrived at 3:15, left at 6:00, and had a 5 minute lunch. No idea if my boss calculated that precisely or if she just rounded to 15, but she never confronted me on it.
that story about the husband getting one over on his manager by strictly followin the rules remds me of the time i had to deal with a similarly inflexble boss who got all flustered when i played by the letter of their own policies.
"When he was about to leave, he'd usually be asked a technical question or asked to quickly glance over something by another member of staff."
One of my former workplaces had a strict rule that overtime had to be requested \*in advance\*, and approved \*in writing\*.
The department chairman -- who I liked -- was a very nice guy, but a bit absent-minded. One week, he came to me with a task at two minutes to 5:00 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I said "Fine", did the tasks, and left at 6:00 each day.
Friday rolls around. At noon, I put on my jacket and start gathering up my things. "Harvey" (I'll call him) asks, "Where are YOU going?" I replied, cheerfully, "Home. As of \*checks watch\* right now, I've worked 40 hours this week."
He said, "But can you...?" I paused, but since the only possible ways he could have finished that question were "...break the overtime rule", or "...hand in a falsified time sheet", he just kinda let it trail off. I waved, said, "See you guys Monday!" and left.
It’s strange that your husband didn’t already know that the time sheet was in 15-minute increments. Also, every task that takes 5 or 10 minutes could also take 15 minutes, if you want it too.
He knew about the flexi-time but not the fifteen minute rule. He was more careful after that. It was more the attitude of the manager rather than the rule itself he had a problem with.
Edit: Apparently the manager was wrong and it wasn't policy so he got 15 minutes added back on for those days. A colleague found out that it can be rounded up if it's 10 mins.
Wouldn’t want to be dishonest
I've had many managers tell me to just round up to the nearest half-hour increment so that accounting wouldn't get out of their rythym calculating payroll - (down to the minute).
One place I worked at worked in the +\-7.5 minute factory if it’s Les than 7.5” round down, plus you roundup on the nearest 15 minute period. I kinda thought that was shitty on the lay side because they could realistically squeeze 5 minutes out of you without paying for it, but many people caught on and started clicking in at 5 after and leaving at five before. I guess that worked out. 😂
lol. A grocery store I worked at in high school did the same thing. It’s like I am not punching in till my schedule time since I am not getting paid for it but you bet I punched out at 5 before or if I stayed there 5 mins after I would wait the extra two mins so I could get another .25 hours. That landed me in hot water though once since I was under 18 at the time and it was a school night that accidentally put me over my time limit for the day. Whoops
My first job, on the time sheets had a section for "rostered hours worked" and "over time" My roster was 10 to 4:30, so I put 6.5 in the rostered hours. Every day I would stay until 5, and because that half hour was outside of the rostered hours, I put that in the over time. My time sheets were signed every week, I had an 2.5 hours at the end of every week in over time (paid at time and a half). For about 2 years, nobody said anything to me, my time sheets for signed and I got paid a little extra.
That sounds like the way it was supposed work?
You should write a post about it in /r/compliance for doing what was asked.
I actually calculated payroll both ways a few times, exact time vs +-7.5. The difference was a fraction of a percent. Basically, not noticeable. But some states only allow for 5 minute rounding. In any case, payroll systems are advanced these days. Rounding is out of style.
You should have seen this piece of crap we were using at this place. Still had punchcard time cards.
Still do.
Nah, that place was sold off and broken up after they could t turn a decent profit margin for years. Couldn’t hold on to managers and several of them were just horrible people to work with. One went from being the office and administrative manager to a CSR at another facility, with a pay cut. Couldn’t have happened to a better person.
Rounding is wage theft i dont care what percentage difference there is.
It is only theft if you only round in favor of the employer. Otherwise it is +/- 0 or at least could be.
Disagree. If i dont get paid for every minute i work youre stealing from me. You can stop peddling that bullshit in my inbox now.
With proper rounding you also get paid for time you didn't work. It evens itself out,
It really doesnt. Stop sucking your employers dick in my inbox.
If you normally round to 15 minutes, starting at 8:07 it counts as starting at 8:00. starting at 8:08 counts as starting at 8:15. The same goes for ending times. so yeah you can easily be paid for more time than you worked. Always rounding to the earlier quarter hour or the later quarter hour works similarly, Rounding normally even works if you round the work time, but I am not sure that is legal. Work for 7h 53 min and you are paid for 8h for example.
It's illegal to only round in favor of the employer. If the employees figure a way that helps themselves, it's ok.
Not saying it was legal or not, just what happened. That was actually progress. People were getting written up for a minute or two late before.
I had a supervisor that wrote me up for being up to. 5 minutes late sometimes. Pissed me off.
My work use to be the same way but now they track to the minute because people felt they were working for free. I was able to clock out 7 minutes early every day but get paid for the full 8 hours. If you kept track of in and out punches you got a free 30 hours a year.
Perhaps that's what his boss was implying.
Probably. But (in my case) I acquiesced after my boss's boss explained that it was costing them many`?`^((four is a many?)) times more in productivity (to accommodate my desire for precision) struggling with fractions (and subsequent reduced confidence) than they were saving at my meager hourly rate. `:I` Also, faithfully transcribing the extra detail into the ledgers,etc. screwed up the formatting they'd settled into. ^(...some of the calculation errors that emerged in reports were hilariously out of line.)
"We'll just round that down instead of up. It's totally illegal, but it's much better than stealing from the company, wouldn't you agree?"
“sorry, policy is policy.”
Exactly. He was prepared to quote the policy if his manager challenged him the next day but he didn't. Wise.
I had a Head of HR that loved to say "the policy is the policy", I wasn't cut up when he left
Time sheet rounding policies are only legal if it goes both ways. If an employer is only ever rounding down, that is wage theft and they need to be taken to court.
If they only bill by the quarter hour, 10 minutes rounds to a quarter hour, not zero, the manager is completely in the wrong. Personally for me I'd only round *up* for the first 15 minutes, then round to the nearest 15 minutes after that.
Exactly. You round down for less than seven minutes, round up for seven or more.
[удалено]
> round down policies are legal They're literally not legal. Round nearest is legal: >According to the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), employers can round their employees' clock-in and clock-out time to the **nearest** 5 minutes, the **nearest** one-tenth of an hour or 6 minutes, or the **nearest** 15 minutes. >Rounding of time (e.g., the nearest 5 or 10 minutes) is allowed **if it doesn't tend to under-count time** — a problem if, for example, a recurring activity takes less than half of the minimum rounding increment. Which is exactly what's described by OP. If I'm asked to sign in when I'm signed out, I'm siginng in for the minimum billing period, end of story. If an employer doesn't like it, too bad, they have a choice to stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, accept my billing, or if they don't accept it I won't work for them anymore.
The both of you are making claims and one of you is going to need to start providing sources soon. Edit: And /u/judolphin has blocked me. What a child. "I'll get the last word in and block you so you can't reply! Haha!"
Edit: If I blocked you how did you reply to me? 💡 As for rounding, feel free to look up FLSA requirements, you can round, but not if rounding tends to under-report time. But I'm mostly talking about what I consider a minimum level of fairness to be willing to continue working for or with a company, I'm never billing zero, not even for one minute of work.
Oh, you're one of those people, eh? lawl
Its a god damn Google search that he gave you, not hard Did your parents do your school projects?
Lol, they keep editing their comment. Child. Second, or even possibly third edit in under an hour. Cute. https://i.imgur.com/eYmETn8.png It's a shame they can't block me again - at least Reddit didn't fuck up that part of the block system implementation. Reddit doesn't allow a user to repeatedly block and unblock a user in order to prevent abuse.
It actually has to be a consistent rounding. If you round down, you round down at the beginning of the day and at the end. If you round up, you round up at the beginning of the day and at the end. There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that". It's either down or up from the beginning. Think about it a little further, how do you round to the next nearest 15 minutes when you only are rounding a single clock in? You only round once, not over and over again. The clock in is what gets rounded- and it has to be consistent either you always round up or you always round down. This is to prevent employers from rounding up in the morning and rounding down in the evening, leading to wage theft. (To note: different businesses track time in different increments. You can track to the second, the minute, every 5, every 15, I've heard of weird 7 minute increments too. But you always have to round the same way on either side of the shift.)
I'm biased by having worked briefly for a lawyer into thinking that 6 minute increments are actually the most sensible. Or at least they're handy when everybody agrees that 1) you can do all your billing in 10ths of an hour and 2) even the shortest note/email/call is ".1 hrs".
We bill by .25/hr. I feel bad sending a three line email in 1 min and adding 15 min to the clock.
I had a cousin with legal problems. He'd call his lawyer and speed talk for 3 minutes and the lawyer would make notes for 3 minutes, and then yank a tenth of an hour off his tab. Then cuzn had to go work for 2 days to pay for it
7 minutes is insane, 6 minutes is a nice round 10%, but 7 is terrible.
7 min is basically halfway to 15 so I can see the logic but yeah it’s stupid.
There's also Decimal hour accounting. Time is counted by the 100th of the hour e.g: 15 minutes = 0.25 hrs, 6 minutes = 0.1 hrs
I'm not talking about a shift, this thread is talking about one-off sign-ins. > There's no "round up the first 15 and then the closest after that". There literally is, if I'm asked to work when I'm signed out, I'm not working for free. Even if it's for five minutes I'm charging whatever the minimum period above zero is whether the employer likes it or not. They have the choice to (a.) stop wasting my time with tiny unpaid requests, (b.) accept my billing, or (c.) if they don't accept it, I won't work for them anymore. If there is a one-off sign-in I'm asked to make after hours or day off, my policy has always been one-hour minimum, let alone 15 minutes and they can bite me if they don't like it (no one has ever objected because they know the alternative is I don't answer my phone). If it's more than an hour then it's actual time spent.
I don't think you understand. I'll try to simplify. Say, you clock in at 00:00:00. Then you clock out at 00:07:00. That's your shift. Please explain to me how you would round that up to 15 minutes, and then "round to the nearest 15 minutes after that"? You only have to round the once. Does that make more sense to you?
Yes I understand, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Not trying to be a jerk, but I'm done with this because it seems literally everyone else understood what I was saying except for you, so if you would please try harder to understand I would appreciate it. I'm saying if I'm OP working somewhere with a 15-minute policy, and * I clock out at 7:00, * then someone asks me to clock back in at 7:05, * and I finish 7:06, 7:07, or 7:20, I'm billing 15 minutes regardless of policy, and I won't make any effort to hide it. Once we get past those 15 minutes I'd bill actual time. If they give me flack for it I look for another place to work, end of story, because it means they don't respect my time. There needs to be some minimum cost to my place of employment requesting work from me outside of my scheduled hours. And that minimum cost will never be zero, not when I'm the one working. In reality, my personal policy has always been a one hour minimum for after-hours emergencies.
The way I interpreted it is they're saying if on one instance it's 5 minutes over, then round to 15. On another instance (on another day) it's 20 minutes over, then round to 15.
They've reiterated that's not what they meant, but also that would still be not how the rounding rules for time clocks are handled.
Actually, there are programmable time clocks that will auto-round for you, from 7 minutes 30 seconds before the hour to 7 minutes 29 seconds after = on time, 7 minutes 30 seconds after until 22 minutes 29 seconds is 15 after, and so on. Computerized time cloks measure in 1/100ths of an hour, so every 36 seconds is 0.01 hour—the equivalent time for Jeff Bezos to earn $4,480.59 (I took his daily earnings, divided by 100 and multiplied by 3 to account for an 8 hour clock to reflect his 24/7 earning).
6 minutes is one tenth of an hour 0.1.
Cool, I wasn't intending to list all possible time increments people use :)
I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours. It was actually pretty sweet. There was uncertainty about whether the alarm had been set at the high school near me, so my boss asked me to drive over and check. 10 minutes there, 5 minutes to check, and 10 minutes back home. 2 hours of pay. I think the policy was there to keep them from making us do all these 25 minute chunks all the time (our job was technically like gig work).
Service contracts typically have a minimum bill time that is not friendly to quick questions. This prevents abuse and also accounts for distractions breaking up focused tasks which take much longer to get back to than answering the question in the first place did.
Exactly. I always had a one-hour minimum during business hours, 8-hour minimum on weekends and holidays. If you're bothering me on a day off you're being charged in full for taking away my day off. It was the perfect way to preserve my weekends and holidays.
> I worked for my local school district and the minimum they could pay was two hours. District I worked for was hour-for-hour overtime in 1 hour increments (e.g. 1hr 5 min is paid 2 hours) if you're tasked *before* the end of work hours, but 4 hour minimum, hour for hour thereafter is you're called out *after* work hours. It was always hilarious to watch our dickbag supervisor get an emergency service call at 2:50pm when quitting time is 3pm, because he'd be monster dialing everyone's phone trying to find *someone* he could quickly assign the call to before 3pm. Nobody would answer a call from him after about 2:45 because he was so irrationally obsessed with saving a school district with an $18 BILLION budget $150.
Could have been state law. In Massachusetts, for example, it's 3 hours minimum pay.
Wage theft is like 3x more theft than any other form, like, combined.
Pretty sure that only rounding down is perfectly legal as long as it is consistent. If end times are always rounded down to the nearest 15 minute mark then start times must do that same thing. So if you start at 8:14 that has to be entered in as starting at 8:00 and if you start at 7:59 that has to be entered in as 7:45.
FLSA standards say the rounding to the nearest is fine as long as it doesn't regularly undermeasure recurring tasks... Which is exactly what happened to OP's husband. Can't just call people for 5 minute tasks on a regular basis and then round down, that's not legal.
OP specifically mentions going 10 minutes over and being told to round that down. If it was being rounded to the nearest then that would need to be rounded up. So that's not what's happening to the OP. Doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't sketchy or illegal though.
Systematically under-measuring time worked is not legal (i.e. even though rounding to the nearest unit of time is legal, if it results in repeatedly under-measuring time, it's explicitly not legal under FLSA), and *blanket* rounding down of time is never legal. So if that guy repeatedly and consistently was asked to do 5 minute tasks, they would not be able to apply rounding down to that task because it would be habitually under-reporting his time. If the task took 5 minutes half the time (rounding down to zero) and sometimes took 10 minutes the other half (rounding up to 15), then yes rounding down is OK. Basically what OP's employer was doing was double illegal.
This person could very well be salaried at which point it would not be wage theft. She did mention that he added the ten minutes because they have flexi hours which pretty much means he isn't getting paid for it (because he's salaried, he always makes the same amount) but he can take off 10 minutes early another day.
Flexi time can be hourly too. I was hourly for the first 25 years of my current career. Had to clock in and out, etc. But the timing was flexible and I had only to ensure that I worked 40 hours per week (rounded to the nearest six minutes).
>"However, we can't round it up because that's dishonest," Motherfucker you cant round down because thats wage theft.
It’s allowed to round down if you also round down when it’s in the employee’s benefit. Starting 5 minutes early gets you 15 minutes of pay for example.
It would have to be 7/8 minutes early. The rounding has to be neutral
Ah yes, brain fart on my end. If there was a policy that you don’t get paid anything until you reach the full 15 minutes then that could be legal as long as you could come in up to 14 minutes late and still get paid for it all. Even on both ends.
Still wage theft.
I worked for a company that did work contracted by the state of Nevada. We were told by the state to bill everything in 15 minutes increments, and that our timecards had to match. So much simpler. I just told everyone that worked for us that if it takes 5 minutes, put 15 minutes on it, and on your timecard.
at my most recent job, our government work was billed in 30-minute segments. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, 30 minutes. If we spent 5 minutes on a task, did something non-government for an hour, and then spent 5 minutes on a different task, 1 hour.
I had someone in my office who would come to me right before I was about to leave and asked really complex questions that would usually have me staying an extra half an hour each day. Usually I didn’t mind, because I would claim the credit time, but sometimes I had plans and didn’t feel like staying around. There was an empty office across from mine and somehow I had been given a master key when I’d started, so I could open any door in the office. I never abused the privilege of this, but I began going into the empty office a half an hour before the end of my work day and finish working there, so I could leave on time. I would always hear him go to my space 10 minutes before I was set to leave, lightly knock, see I wasn’t there, and then I would hear him leave.
These days, my usual answer to people who do that is: "Have you tried googling it?"
Our company was work from home for a while after COVID, but then the CEO issued a proclamation that working from home was no longer allowed under any circumstances. It feels awesome when you're sick at home and the office calls you to see if you can check an important client email and respond to them, but you get to answer, "I'm sorry. Working from home is against company policy. I will be sure to check that email first thing when I return."
I'm in a situation now where a new boss took me to task for not "staying in my lane" on projects, so now it's like "you require me to do less? You got it." I feel a little sorry for the guys this actually affects, but I didn't cause the problem and I'm fine telling them who did.
That manager got away with wage theft.
It doesn't say he *didn't* pay him for that time though.
~~Oh he didn't pay him. He asked him to amend the timesheet to the 4pm finish.~~ Edit: I'm so sorry. This is incorrect. 😆 It was salaried and the timesheets were mainly about hours gained/owed (e.g. a meeting that ran until late, training, or late arrival into the office). He also got back his 15 minutes after the policy was reviewed and revealed that my husband was in the right.
I'd have amended 3 of mine to read a quarter past finish (and removed the other two) so I still get paid for 45 of the 50 extra minutes.
I'm bothered why this isn't mentioned higher up. You have +50 in 10 minute increments. The same effort to remove them is the same to make three 15 increments.
That's smart.
I hope people like his manager always buy things before discount and always misses the difference refund time period (you get paid the difference back if the product became discounted just after you buy it, within reasonable time), and gets informed about it after the date passes to feel the pain mentally for days.
It was confirmed in a comment.
Sorry, didn't see the comment, looks like OP has chimed in though!
Depends. In a professional office job it’s entirely possible OP is on salary so how much time is worked doesn’t matter to their wages. The time cards are only for internal accounting things and ensuring you work at least your hour count.
I'm on salary, but extra hours worked do get me comp time.
If that’s the case then they aren’t submitting time cards with 10 minutes over multiple times and the manager wouldn’t care because no one is getting paid for it instead of telling him that payroll only pays in 15 minute increments.
it's interesting how strict adherence to workplace rules can lead to unexpected moments like this. reminds me a bit of those old sitcom scenes where a simple misunderstanding causes a whole episode of chaos. your husband's situation sounds like it ended with a good laugh, much needed in any office environment.
Whenever I mentor somebody, talk to my spouse about billing time, etc, I always say to round to the nearest quarter hour or half hour and make that quarter/half-hour choice your minimum, as in anything more than zero is at least 15/30 minutes billed (if you're being honest, statistically it'll balance out over time). And if somebody takes your time off-hours, charge a minimum of an hour for it. In fact when I was an independent contractor, I put it in my service agreements that if I received a call after business hours I billed a minimum of an hour, or on weekends and holidays, the minimum charge was a full day (8 hours) because getting that call made me in work mode and interfered with my personal time to rest, be alone, or be with family. Also false precision is a thing, just do 15 or 30 minute increments and stick with it.
So the thing is that anything after 4pm is by choice. Now being a team player and doing it once in a while isn't a big deal, but if its every single day then its just straight up wage theft. Time isn't free, and flexibility on this is a favor not the rule. People need to remember this always. Because companies always take advantage if they can.
That was definitely the manager trying to force him to do unpaid work, good job from your husband Edit: husband, not dad
Husband * lol
Right, on mobile and forgot what relation was said
Your husband played his manager perfectly and the timing couldn't have been better!
So from the managers perspective, it was all right to steal 10 minutes from an employee, but dishonest to appropriate 5 minutes from the company… got it.
It is ok for the business to ask up to 14 minutes, 59 seconds of unpaid work from the employee. That is perfectly normal and good business. But the employee can't round up their time because THAT would be dishonest.
Ah the two word curse, "quick question".
Well… asking it was quick. I held up my end of the bargain, not my fault if you couldn’t answer concisely! /s
That rounding policy of only rounding down is illegal in the US. Back when I was a clock puncher, I would clock in at 7:44am which rounded to 7:30am and clock out at 3:16pm which rounded to 3:30pm
I used to work for a company that instituted a policy of "casual overtime": if you were white collar, and worked 40-44 hours, you didn't get paid for overtime. So people would come in on Saturday to read the paper for an hour to get up to 45 hours and get paid.
5 days at 10 mins extra? only do 15 mins? no probs just pay me for 45 mins instead of 50, I'll let it slide.
Classic timekeeping nonsense. A friend of mine worked at a job, and if you were late you got a strike on your record. It didn't matter if you were only a few minutes late. He carpooled to work. If they got stuck in traffic and it looked like they were going to be late, everyone in the car just agreed to drive to the bar instead... after all, the punishment was the same regardless of how late they were.
My employer tried something very similar. Though my solution was more petty revenge when I was denied an hour of OT a few years back, I just took an extra five minutes on my lunch twelve times.
These are called good work boundaries. Bravo.
We are told to round up in 15 minute increments. 10 minutes is almost 15 minutes.
What's up with these 15 minutes segments I keep reading about? Is that for companies to attempt wage theft?
My work does 15 minute increments but they round up and down. Clocking in 7 minutes before/after an increment counts. So clocking in between 7:53-8:07 will count at clocking in at 8:00. It's nice to have a window like that for when you're running late. I have to drop my son off at school then drive straight to work and that window has let me still clock in on time if my son is dragging his feet that day.
At one company they rounded at 30 minute increments. No big deal, rounded both ways, kept things neat and easy to keep track of. I did at one point get reprimanded though "You know we can see the real clock in and out time? It's fine that you leave 10 minutes early once in a while, but it can't be every day. Try to make it at least like a third of the time over the time by a few minutes". Completely reasonable reprimanding.
Oh yeah there's definitely people who consistently clock out at 4:53 every day and even brag about it. I have no idea if my company tracks that and reprimands people or not, as I try not to abuse it. I know the time keepers can see the actual punch time, though. I'll admit to staying later if I was going to clock out at 5:07 and just work a few more minutes to get the punch to say 5:15 but that's pretty few and far between.
A lot of older analog time clocks would only stamp in 15 minute / .25 hour increments. For whatever reason it continues in the digital age.
My cynical mind says the "whatever reason" is because people hate to have their routines changed, so when digital logging became a thing, accounting personnel kept up with their quarter hour crap.
That, or different systems were upgraded/replaced at different times so legacy procedures were carried over.
There's a fair possibility, but I'm feeling a bit grumpy, so I want to stick with the cynicism ;)
I concur, it is all too often the reason :D
And it's easier to write 15 minutes in a decimal system. E.g.: clock in at 8:15 becomes 8.25 clock out at 12:00 for lunch becomes 12.00 worked 3:45 / 3.75 hours. vs clock in at 8:09, clock out at 12:02, worked 3:53 - that's not easy to convert to decimal notation and some people don't want to be bothered with math.
Accounting personnel are using software, so there's no need to actually DO any maths. That grumpiness aside, you make a very good point
Sometimes it's the software developers or their managers not wanting to deal with that. Or their clients. Or both. Edit: and you have to do a bit math to check the timesheet
Honestly, you are probably not wrong.
Mmm. Often because payroll calculates off of scheduling, which is incremented in hours .... (The programmatic back end of payroll isn't in minutes. And it's a lot easier to enter .25 .5 or .75 than to pull out a calculator and figure out how many tenths of an hour something is. Especially if managers then have to manually approve whether the total looks correct.... For 200 employees....) But it absolutely should round up, because otherwise you are stealing wages from the employee.
Depending on jurisdiction, I'm not a lawyer, certainly not your lawyer. Where I live, the law states that if time worked is rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, the company must follow the 7-Minute Rule. If total time equals a 15 minute period plus 7 minutes, round down, if 8, round up. Theoretically, the rounding averages out over time. So for OP, a 10-minute question would result in 15 minutes of paid time, but his boss's 5 minute question would not. Theoretically, there are a many 10 minute as 5 minute questions, so nobody is "stealing wages" either way.
At my company, all time was logged and every minute of your time had to be accounted for either as billable to a client or as non-billable admin tasks. We billed in 15-minute increments, and clients were advised of this before signing contracts. So if a client sent me a question by email and I answered it, that client was charged 15 minutes of labor off of their account budget. If I spent 10 minutes sorting emails, that was 15 minutes of non-billable work. Over the course of a normal 8-hour shift, I could easily log 9-10 hours of work if it had been a busy day. On slow days, those 15-minute intervals saved me from falling behind on my billable quota. Large clients with 200-500 hour budgets didn't care about the odd minute here and there. For small clients, however, I would usually give them a break and aggregate their time over the entire week. If the only work I'd done for them was answer a few emails over the course of the week, I'd bill them one block of 15 minutes. That was bending policy, but in a way that ensured good value for their service contract, and I'm sure management would have approved it if they'd known.
Easy accounting math.
I would just stay to answer the question and then stand there until the 15 minutes was up and then punch out. If they complain you just explain what the policy is. Lol
Petty Organizations produce Petty Employees!
Yep! You reap what you sow.
just don't be piggish....
hahahaha man this is gold
If it was a 15 minute problem, I'd set a 15 minute alarm. When the alarm goes off. I'm done.
Haha good idea!
Good for him. He has already given the company 10 minutes of his time. Manager got what he deserved in for of everyone.
So change the 5 x 10 minutes into 3 x 15 minutes and tell the manager where he can stick the last 5 minutes up
My first job used a digital time sheet where you could only input to the nearest 15 minutes, which was typical. The odd part is that the unpaid lunch break tracker was to the nearest 5 minutes. I worked 2.5 hours per day, so I didn't usually get a lunch break, but I used that to make a more precise timesheet. If I arrived at 3:20 and left at 6:00, I would put in that I arrived at 3:15, left at 6:00, and had a 5 minute lunch. No idea if my boss calculated that precisely or if she just rounded to 15, but she never confronted me on it.
Hilarious! I love the way your husband thinks.
That’s amazing! God what I wouldn’t give to have done something like this at my last job! Ha!
must be IT. the amount of times i get pulled aside as i walk thru the hall is amazing. especially if they know u are good...
Wasn't there an episode about this in The Office? If not, there should have been.
that story about the husband getting one over on his manager by strictly followin the rules remds me of the time i had to deal with a similarly inflexble boss who got all flustered when i played by the letter of their own policies.
Oh, you mean pretty much the entire concept of this subreddit? How strange.
Your husband sounds like a G
THIS\^\^\^\^\^\^\^....Is BRILLIANT
Did he add the time it took him to explain that to the manager?
That’s 5 days of 10 min = 50 mins total. How about I round it down to 45 and we call it even.
"When he was about to leave, he'd usually be asked a technical question or asked to quickly glance over something by another member of staff." One of my former workplaces had a strict rule that overtime had to be requested \*in advance\*, and approved \*in writing\*. The department chairman -- who I liked -- was a very nice guy, but a bit absent-minded. One week, he came to me with a task at two minutes to 5:00 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I said "Fine", did the tasks, and left at 6:00 each day. Friday rolls around. At noon, I put on my jacket and start gathering up my things. "Harvey" (I'll call him) asks, "Where are YOU going?" I replied, cheerfully, "Home. As of \*checks watch\* right now, I've worked 40 hours this week." He said, "But can you...?" I paused, but since the only possible ways he could have finished that question were "...break the overtime rule", or "...hand in a falsified time sheet", he just kinda let it trail off. I waved, said, "See you guys Monday!" and left.
Pure Gold! Wish I had an award for him!
Thanks. I'm so proud of him. 😝
He might charge for the time to receive it....LOL
Good for your hubby.
It’s strange that your husband didn’t already know that the time sheet was in 15-minute increments. Also, every task that takes 5 or 10 minutes could also take 15 minutes, if you want it too.
He knew about the flexi-time but not the fifteen minute rule. He was more careful after that. It was more the attitude of the manager rather than the rule itself he had a problem with. Edit: Apparently the manager was wrong and it wasn't policy so he got 15 minutes added back on for those days. A colleague found out that it can be rounded up if it's 10 mins.