A computer uses 150kWh/year @ $0.42/kWh that is $75/year. Certainly internet is possible at $60/month so $720/year. Say you have a generous $500/5 years for equipment plan and you are still below $1,000/year/employee.
Yes there are other expenses but you should already be providing a PC etc.
How are you getting to millions at a small company? Certainly a shop with 3,000 people is out a few million but... You have 3,000 people you are doing fine.
Heck with 20 people $1m is what $50k/person? You wouldn't spend that leasing everyone a Mercedes at $605/month.
> A computer uses 150kWh/year @ $0.42/kWh that is $75/year. Certainly internet is possible at $60/month so $720/year. Say you have a generous $500/5 years for equipment plan and you are still below $1,000/year/employee.
So California is adding a bunch of administrative expenses for something that will net out to a few thousand dollars max per employee. Workers that have to go the office easily spend more than this on just commuting costs.
How would this be a huge admin expense? Any company with remote employees already likely have some expensing process, would be probably as much as adding another expense category at best.
What's the admin expense? Won't it just be another line item in the paycheck? It's only an issue if the employer makes requests that exceed the that budget and get called out.
If it's just a fixed amount refunded to all employees, agreed there's no huge admin expense. If employees have different amounts (depending on their circumstances) that they get refunded, there is a lot of complexity required to set rules around what is acceptable, track receipts for these expenses, and have someone review and approve these.
For example, we used expensify at a previous company, and ignoring the human admin cost, there was a $20 / expense report fee the company had to pay.
This is where a little creative problem solving could come into play. You know, having all those "administrators" actually do their jobs.
One simple way to set this up that minimizes administrative overhead is to estimate a base amount for each remote employee, and automatically reimburse that amount. If the employee's actual expenses exceed the base amount, then and only then do manual processes and $20 expense reports need to be involved.
When I said "for each remote employee," it would probably work best to have the base amount set up individually for each remote worker, based on relevant factors such as cost of electricity and such, when they start working remotely. If the base amount proves to be consistently too low, after a period of say, 6 months, then the employee could file some sort of amendment and have the amount reviewed. If the increased reimbursement based on the amendment request is determined to be reasonable, then just retroactively reimburse the difference to the employee and continue forward with the new base amount. It should also probably be re-reviewed yearly.
That should get it done for every remote employee in the company, with a maximum of around 2 manual interventions per year, rather than an expense report every 2 weeks or anything ridiculous like that.
Simple when someone gets hired they list their internet expenses.
Also isnt this basic admin just the cost of doing business?
I should probably not tell you that in europe its common to be reimbursed for traveling expenses when going to the office. Calculated per commute at 0.19 euro per kilometer. So its unique per employee. No company has gone bankrupt due to administrative weight yet.
> No company has gone bankrupt due to administrative weight yet.
Administrative weight has absolutely been a factor in companies collapsing. That's an absurd statement.
And as a specific example, the company I work at just does a blanket credit for work from home expenses to every employee to avoid the administrative overhead. Yes it's not a huge admin overhead, but it's one more thing a company has to read and understand the rules on (in each state), enact policies / processes for, and have an employee process reimbursements for.
Frankly, as an employee this just feels unnecessary. I'm already comparing the cost of commuting, work clothes, etc when deciding where to work. The "work from home expenses" end up being less than the "work from an office" expenses, so I'm not sure why California finds it necessary for employers to reimburse one but not the other. It's adding extra complexity for fairly limited benefit (something California seems to be great at).
Average Cali salary is 73k. Assume an employee stays for 2 years (I just made this number up, I have no idea what the average retention for a remote worker is, but it’s probably more). It would barely represent 1% of total renumeration for the employee. “Significant” is not a word I’d use to describe a 1-2% cost to an employer.
Gross is silly you need to talk net. Living wage in California is like 37k before taxes 43k if you include taxes on that and assuming a tax rate of around 25% of the rest that means you have excess take home of $22,500 a year.
$2,000 a year would be around 10% extra income not related to staying alive.
I wouldn't call 10% a minor deal.
Also your point about 1-2% cost shows why this is a good bill. Cover the things you need to, pay a few points of payroll and get a significant benefit for your employees.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... “Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector,
by State, August 2023 and 2022 (Cents per Kilowatthour)” — according to this, both $0.42/kWh and $0.06/kWh would be outliers, relative to any state-wide residential averages.
We're in Alameda, who run their own utility and buys their power from PG&E and our rates are $0.15/kwh. I don't know how PG&E still exists as an entity, they were deserving of the pitchforks a long while ago.
The cost of the power itself is not the driving cost of electricity, it's the distribution and grid maintenance costs. PG&E can sell power delivered easily and in bulk to Alameda in the heart of the bay area quite cheaply. Delivering the same kWh to all of the smaller communities in the rural north third of the PG&E coverage area is where much of the costs are.
Hello fellow Alamedan! AMP is great — very grateful for a little abstraction between us an PG&E, despite it being all the same at the end of the day...
I moved out of CA but it was already 0.40 a couple years ago. My friends told me it’s close to 0.60 now. I’m more curious where you are, I’m in a low(er) cost of living and I still pay 0.17.
We're around there (hand-waving here about exchange rate) in Scotland. What's fucked up is that most of the UK's power is generated in the north and yet electricity rates are based on how far you are from London.
Here in South Africa the rate is about 0.15 (USD, depending on exchange rate), but they keep turning off the electricity because the state-owned utility cannot make enough of it. Load shedding they euphemistically call it instead of the blackouts it really is. Of course they also complain about loss of revenue because we use and thus pay for less kWh if they keep turning it off.
Somewhere with real time pricing. The cheapest normal pricing is down around 12-13 cents per kWh. Granted due to the enormous nuclear base load in Chicago, I routinely pay 1-2 cents per kWh. I paid zero cents at 4am.
Yes there are other expenses but you should already be providing a PC etc.
How are you getting to millions at a small company? Certainly a shop with 3,000 people is out a few million but... You have 3,000 people you are doing fine.
Heck with 20 people $1m is what $50k/person? You wouldn't spend that leasing everyone a Mercedes at $605/month.