Switching from Cash to Electronic Payments: How to Manage Secondary Employment More Efficiently
It’s no secret that overtime and off-duty jobs are a popular way for law enforcement officers to supplement their income. In fact, the average officer can work up to 170 hours of off-duty and overtime in a single year.
* For most agencies, those hours (and payments) can add up quickly.
For example:
An agency has 50 officers that are eligible to work off-duty jobs and overtime
The average job pays $40/hour
170 hours/year x $40/hour = $6,800 in annual revenue generated by each officer
$6,800 x 50 officers - $340,000 in annual revenue generated by the agency
Can your agency afford to lose track of those payments?
In our experience, we’ve come to understand that every law enforcement agency is different. Some agencies prefer to be hands-off and allow their personnel to work directly with the employers/vendors. Other agencies go through great lengths to try and keep tabs on what off-duty jobs are being worked, who is working them, and how much money is exchanging hands. In both scenarios, it is very likely that paper invoices and cash transactions are being used, which often leads to a number of problems for the agency.
Problem #1: Wasted Time
When an officer gets paid for off-duty or overtime work, it typically happens in one of a few different ways. In some cases, the officer is paid directly by the employer in cash and on-site. In other cases, the agency will pay its officers first and then send an invoice to the employer to collect. Some agencies have a details office with one or more employees managing the scheduling, invoices, and payments. Other agencies require their officers to turn in their time sheets to someone at a completely separate office run by the county/city. In all of these scenarios, a significant amount of time (several hours/week) is wasted to accomplish a task that would only take a few minutes to complete using a software solution like PowerDetails.
Problem #2: Inaccurate Payment Records
Paper invoices are functional, but when they are paid in cash, inaccuracies are bound to occur. Not only does cash leave no paper trail, it creates an inherent lack of accountability within your off-duty detail process. Whether it be an inaccurate recording of hours worked or overpayment of the officer by the vendor, the agency has no way of accounting for these errors and runs the risk of uncollected fees.
Problem #3: Officer Fatigue & Misconduct
Officers love to receive cash payments because it is convenient and immediate reimbursement for their services. However, this practice creates numerous opportunities for misconduct and abuse of the system. When personnel submit inaccurate invoices, the agency not only loses money, but also incurs the risk of officer fatigue. If an agency has no way of accurately tracking and reporting the number of hours worked each week by their personnel, then it makes them liable for any potential actions taken by an overworked officer.
The solution? Electronic payments.
The PowerDetails app makes it easy to create an estimate, send an invoice, and collect payment in advance using our estimates module. Once an estimate or invoice is sent, employers can pay online via credit/debit card or through secured ACH payments and these payments will be deposited directly into your agency’s bank account to make sure you and your officers get paid promptly. By allowing agencies to collect all payments electronically before the job even begins, PowerDetails ensures that the the issues associated with cash payments are never a concern.
Additional costs and accountability:
Despite the numerous benefits that overtime and off-duty details have for an agency and its officers, the responsibility of managing the entire process can be a lot to handle. As more of that responsibility falls on an agency’s administrative department, a lack of accountability can often lead agencies to incur additional costs that should be paid by the employer.
Among those costs is, labor. If your agency has an off-duty department, or an off-duty coordinator dedicated to managing this process, then calculating the cost of labor should be straightforward. However, if your agency handles its off-duty and overtime scheduling using a decentralized process, then you need to stop and think about how much time is wasted in traveling to the appropriate office, filling out and submitting a paper report of hours work/money collected, etc. It can be a major hassle. With an electronic payment system like PowerDetails in place, time spent scheduling and reporting off duty details/overtime could be reduced significantly.
In addition to the labor costs associated with managing this process, agencies must also consider the wear and tear on their department’s vehicles/equipment. When an officer shows up to work an off-duty details, chances are he/she will be in uniform and driving their squad car. Like anything else, the car, the equipment the officer is carrying, and even the officer’s uniform all cost the agency money to maintain and should be factored into the invoice sent to the employer.
One way to do this, is implementing a service fee for each job.
Once your agency determines all of the costs that are associated with working an off-duty job, the next step is to determine an appropriate service fee. A service fee is a great way for agencies to not only recover the costs of their officers working a job, but can also provide the agency with an additional stream of revenue to support other departments. If you have any trouble determining what a fair service fee would be for your agency, the PowerDetails Team would be happy to help you figure it out.
If you would like to see the PowerDetails app in-action and better understand how electronic payments can benefit your agency, click here to schedule a brief web-demonstration of our platform.
*Based on a 2019 analysis of the PowerDetails database
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