Freelance techies moan about DXC billing snafu: No pay for three weeks Contractors plying their trade for DXC Technologies remain in the dark over what some claim is a billing system screw-up that has meant they'd gone unpaid for the past three weeks. The tech hands-for-hire told El Reg they were unable to input time sheets since November 11 on Beeline, the internal process used to manage third- …
"... you are not freelance."
That doesn't follow. What matters is the terms of the contract. The trouble is that having a pimp mediating the contracts introduces an element of uncertainty into those terms. It's certainly preferable to contract direct.
It's certainly preferable to contract direct.
But an increasing trend for companies that employ contractors is to outsource the hiring and contracting through a third party (eg Manpower), meaning that contractors sign up with that agency, or find another gig.
In some cases you can still name your price, but the T&Cs will be standard, and that works far better for the "beneficiary" company, rather than have their own (disinterested) procurement team piffling around with a host of completely different low value contracts, or worse still, the wastrels of HR trying to administer anything.
"But an increasing trend for companies that employ contractors"
There's the problem right there: "employ".
As soon as a client is thinking in those terms you have a problem. I stuck to working with relatively small businesses and mostly getting contracts by reputation or repeat business.
Smaller businesses were also less of a pain to work with unlike, say, the time I covered someone's 2-week holiday with an overlap either side and it was largely occupied by doing the paperwork to get agreement to add another chunk to the database and then more paperwork to get the system admins to make the space from LVM.
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the fact that Experis are the man-in-the-middle doesn't help, as they appear to not be staffed adequately to be able to handle the queries raised by such cock-ups.
They often appear as a corrupting filter on the contracts, where the client and the contractor consultant agree on what is needed (not that they're supposed to talk to each other), but Experis can't quite grasp the wording that needs to go into the contract.
My experience, and that of many other people I know who work through Experis is that they rarely get even a simple contract amendment correct first time.
Considering that systems like this for large companies are mostly based on workflow with approvals required at key points of the engagement, it could just be (A) a missing interface between the DXC/Expiris and Allegis systems, or (B) key user approval hierarchies not being set up and/or tested, or (C) a data migration issue.
Or yes, of course (D) some deep dark conspiracy or collusion between DXP et al to shure up their shaky quarterly finances...
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Worked with a guy, who had a very bad habit of submitting 6 weeks of invoices at a time, so he received a bumper bank deposit.
When he submitted one batch & didn't receive a response on his expected payday 2 weeks later, he discovered that the contracting company had folded 1 week after his last received payment.
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