Hours written off before bonus calculation Forum

[Anonymous User]

How do you handle a situation where you need a certain amount of billable hours by the end of the year to qualify for an extra bonus and your firm writes off 200 of your billable hours in the last month?

Do you assume they're trying to screw you or that they will take into account the hours they wrote off? Do you try to make up for those hours with less than one month to go?

[The Lsat Airbender]

Writeoffs happen near the end of the fiscal year because of haggling with clients over billing. The timing probably isn't meant to screw you. AFAIK bonus targets for juniors don't account for writeoffs unless someone was egregiously overbilling (and even then they're more likely to get a stern warning about next year than noboneused). Talk to a midlevel you trust if you're worried.

[Definitely Not North]

If you’re at a firm that’s factoring write offs into your bonus threshold calculation you should probably just lateral

[Anonymous User]

I've faced this issue a couple times in my career.

1) I once had an offer at a firm (Knobbe Martens?), but they use billed hours instead of billable hours for bonus calculation. I didn't want to be at the whim of write-offs so I went to a different firm.

2) As a junior, I was asked to do some work and the partner later unilaterally changed my hours to non-billable on the matter (maybe about 50 hours). I was very good about getting right at the 2k or whatever I needed to get bonus, so I was freaking out that I would miss it by just a few hours. I sent some aggressive emails to the timekeeping/billing/secretary people for changing my hours without telling me and made them change it again to "business development" plus got the partner to sign off on the BD hours so they would count. Hours were fine and got the bonus (shitty junior bonus but still important)

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

If your firm counts writeoffs against your bonus credit then you should demand consent they next time they write off a single one of your hours.

You won't work at that firm for much longer. Which is the point.