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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
$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.
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.
1. https://www.betterbuyenergy.com/ - Zip 43215
Much of your energy bill is distribution costs, which is a combinational of infrastructure costs and transmission losses.
Transmission losses will be small anywhere in the UK (because it's tiny), but infrastructure costs will vary a lot based on population density.
It's cheaper to erect a few large transmission lines to London than it is to distribute power around the less dense North.
I figured I should aim high since the number was so low.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/Res_Inclu_TOU_Current.xlsx
average billing is currently 38.2c/kwh
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.
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.