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I started my new job last week. There's about five weeks of classroom training before we can even get on the phones (it's a call center). I was so overwhelmed at first because they are throwing A LOT of information at us. But yesterday, something clicked in my head and I realized I was going to be okay. I was getting it. As of now there's one issue I still can't figure out, but I believe I will. I will learn how to prorate!

Awesome! I love when those lightbulb moments happen. Way to go, way to hang in there. It's always tough to feel like you're clueless - to go from really having a handle on your job & knowledge base to being the new kid & not knowing up from down.

For what it's worth, I love prorating! Hopefully this might help ...

I always had to prorate final checks for salaried employees. If they get $1,442.31 per two-week period and their last day is the first Wednesday of the pay period which runs Sunday through the following Saturday ... let's assume green means worked and red means terminated.

S - M - T - W - T - F - S
S - M - T - W - T - F - S

In this case, there are two different ways to prorate, depending on company policy. Some companies would say that weekends don't count for proration because they're not part of "regular business hours." Let's start there.

In the example, the employee worked 3 of the 10 regular business days. 3 / 10 = 30% and 30% of $1,442.31 is $432.69 of final pay to the employee.

In the other option, where the company says that weekends do count because more often than not salaried employees do work on weekends, the employee would have been employed for 4 of the 14 days in the pay period. 4 / 14 = 28.57% and 28.57% of $1,442.31 is $412.07 of final prorated pay to the employee.

The "downside" of this type of example is that it's the payout kind rather than the credit kind. So let's try another type of example.

Your pharmacist gives you 30 pills and charges you $10 (as if!).

Let's say that 15 pills in the bottle are crushed when you open the bottle. You'd expect to get $5 back since you didn't really get the full 30 pills.

In a bit more convoluted scenario, let's say you open the bottle and there are only 7 pills that haven't been crushed beyond use. That means lost out on 23 pills, right? If 30 pills cost $10.00, the cost per pill is $10.00 / 30 pills = $0.33. The pharmacist "owes" you for the pills you can't use or in other words, he will give you a refund of $0.33 each and that means you'd get $7.66 back. In other words, the pharmacist would pro-rate you for the unusable pills.

So in a service setting, if I'm paying $37.95 per month for a service but the service goes out of service for a chunk of time - let's say 6 days in a 31 day month. 6 / 31 = 19% of the whole. $37.95 x 19% (or 0.19) = prorated credit of $7.21 for downtime.

Does that help?

Two months later... LOL. Man have I been wrapped up in my new job. Yes, Ash, that makes sense. I still have the "hold on... do I have this right??" moments, but for the most part, I've gained confidence in my ability to prorate.

I'm such a geek that I'd probably setup some goofy spreadsheet where all I had to do was plug in the variables I'd need for that particular call ... like "here's the monthly rate" and "here's the days in the billing period" and "here's the down/credit time" and voila - there's there prorated amount to credit back to the client!

Glad to hear it's clicking for you. Do you have to do a lot of prorations? (Just out of curiosity - I hardly ever ask, let alone get, prorations from my satellite service!)

Yes, there's quite a bit of prorating. If someone calls in and I need to upgrade or downgrade their service, I need to prorate the charge or credit they'll receive on their next bill since they're making a change of service somewhere in the midst of their regular billing cycle. But if you're not changing your service, then I don't have to worry about prorates. But if you're not changing your service, I'm not making commission, so it's a catch-22. A spreadsheet, huh? I hadn't thought of that! Hm...

My husband was offered a job apparently similar to yours but with Dish Network. It was an inside sales job and basically he had to constantly try to sell to anyone who called in. I would hate work like that cuz I'm so NOT a sales person. I'm like "either you want it or you don't and I really don't care one way or another!" LOL

Is it a challenge to keep up with all the various promotions going on? I think that'd be the toughest part cuz that'd be the best way to know what's the right thing to try to sell to someone. If you see they have Package ABC and you automatically know that includes channels 1, 2 and 3, you can then say "hey, I can offer you Package XYZ to go with what you've already got and you'll get channels 8, 9 and 10 too. It's free for the first three months and only $5.95 after that." I couldn't keep up, I don't think.

And those promotions change every month. And then there are the online promotions. Then I have to know promotions not just for my area, but for Sarasota, Lake County, and Orlando. Those are fun to try and search out. But so far, so good. I've talked my way into a couple of sales here and there. Just gotta keep at it.

I know that I could not handle talking to people on the phone all day, no matter what my job was! Earlier today I gave a collections agency a hard time because they call be every few hours every day of the week starting at 8:00 in the morning (they sound as if they are calling from India so who knows what time it is there). I have already told them to stop calling me since we are working on debt consolidation and will be paying our bills to the people we owe money to and not to them but they still call. I program their numbers in my phone so I can ignore their calls (I don't want to use my cell minutes to answer and hang up) but it still gets annoying so with it being a weekend and having unlimited cell phone minutes, I called them repeatedly for two hours today while I was reading. I know it was childish and immature but at the same time it felt like justified payback and at they are getting paid.

I took a job as security working at Wild Waves Enchanted Village so I am going to have lots of opportunities to deal with annoying people all summer! I had not planned to work there but since I was offered a position as a "returning employee" for working at Fright Fest for a month in October (dressing in costume and scaring people, LOL) I figured I might as well take the job since my daughter needs a job (she will be an airbrush tattoo artist) and I could help her with transportation. I also need the money since book sales are not going so well in this economy right now. As a bonus I get a season pass and 8 guest passes a month (I can buy additional passes for $10) so I will be able to take my younger daughter there this summer. It is crazy the things we will do for money, eh!

I hope that you can enjoy your job more as it becomes easier. While learning about all the new promotions can be a challenge, at least it adds variety to a job that might seem repetitive after awhile.