Charity work
One of the steps I had to take in incorporating myself to be a contractor was to create a corporate bank account. Presumably this means that in order to get paid from this gig, I will either need to put myself on the payroll of the corporation - which gets into the messy realm of payroll taxes - or pay myself dividends from the corporation. Either way, the tax implications are going to be a bit intimidating.
But this is all predicated on me actually getting paid.
The fun thing with this bank account is that because it's a corporate account, the bank naturally needs to take a service fee out of it every month, so each time I checked on the account to see if I'd been paid, I just watched it in the process of going more and more overdrawn. I finally transferred $40 into it from my personal savings account just to stop from being killed by penalties. And I'll probably have to report that as taxable revenue, even though it came from post-tax money that I transferred. Ugh.
Well over a month into my contract, I still haven't been paid, and I began to wonder if I had accidentally signed up to do charity work for my former employer. I mean, I'm enjoying the work, and I get along well with my co-workers, but I've been pouring a lot of brain power and hours into this project, so I was kinda hoping for some kind of compensation.
I started digging around some more - pouring through the terms of the contract, and sifting through other documents on the placement company's website, and the best I could find was that pay day was on the fifteenth of the month. So I waited. The fifteenth came and went with nothing going into my account. They had a lot of "the Monday following" rules, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until the first Monday after the fifteenth. I checked my account on Tuesday; nothing.
I had been submitting my hours faithfully, and I'd been getting correspondence back from the placement company advising me that my hours had been processed, so I began to wonder if there was an issue with the transit number, or bank account number I'd sent them for my account. I also started sifting back through all of the early correspondence I'd received from my boss at the railway to see if there were any clues or gotchas hidden in there.
I looked through one batch of forms he'd sent me, which was mostly to do with confidentiality agreements and the like, and guidelines that were actually for him. In among them was a PDF that may as well have been entitled "Principles of Quantum Entanglement" for all the bearing it appeared to have on me. Its name made it clear that it was for the employer, and not the contractor, but I decided that I should probably give it a read so that I could say that I had exhausted all of my options before sending an angsty email to the placement company.
It was the pay day schedule. There was no hint at all in the name of it that it had anything to do with remuneration, but there it was. It was like somebody had gone out of their way to purposely obscure the purpose of the file.
And when I read the file, I was no more impressed. Any work done in a given month would be paid at the end of the following month. I started at the beginning of last month, but I won't get paid until the end of this month - nearly sixty days before my first cheque. I'm glad that I wasn't depending on this pay cheque. If my account is still sitting at ~$30 at the end of the month then I'll start raising heck.
But this is all predicated on me actually getting paid.
The fun thing with this bank account is that because it's a corporate account, the bank naturally needs to take a service fee out of it every month, so each time I checked on the account to see if I'd been paid, I just watched it in the process of going more and more overdrawn. I finally transferred $40 into it from my personal savings account just to stop from being killed by penalties. And I'll probably have to report that as taxable revenue, even though it came from post-tax money that I transferred. Ugh.
Well over a month into my contract, I still haven't been paid, and I began to wonder if I had accidentally signed up to do charity work for my former employer. I mean, I'm enjoying the work, and I get along well with my co-workers, but I've been pouring a lot of brain power and hours into this project, so I was kinda hoping for some kind of compensation.
I started digging around some more - pouring through the terms of the contract, and sifting through other documents on the placement company's website, and the best I could find was that pay day was on the fifteenth of the month. So I waited. The fifteenth came and went with nothing going into my account. They had a lot of "the Monday following" rules, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and wait until the first Monday after the fifteenth. I checked my account on Tuesday; nothing.
I had been submitting my hours faithfully, and I'd been getting correspondence back from the placement company advising me that my hours had been processed, so I began to wonder if there was an issue with the transit number, or bank account number I'd sent them for my account. I also started sifting back through all of the early correspondence I'd received from my boss at the railway to see if there were any clues or gotchas hidden in there.
I looked through one batch of forms he'd sent me, which was mostly to do with confidentiality agreements and the like, and guidelines that were actually for him. In among them was a PDF that may as well have been entitled "Principles of Quantum Entanglement" for all the bearing it appeared to have on me. Its name made it clear that it was for the employer, and not the contractor, but I decided that I should probably give it a read so that I could say that I had exhausted all of my options before sending an angsty email to the placement company.
It was the pay day schedule. There was no hint at all in the name of it that it had anything to do with remuneration, but there it was. It was like somebody had gone out of their way to purposely obscure the purpose of the file.
And when I read the file, I was no more impressed. Any work done in a given month would be paid at the end of the following month. I started at the beginning of last month, but I won't get paid until the end of this month - nearly sixty days before my first cheque. I'm glad that I wasn't depending on this pay cheque. If my account is still sitting at ~$30 at the end of the month then I'll start raising heck.