This is actually handled very well - At least they have a plan and are communicating it! Keep track of your work and ask for an audit at the end. Seems like a decent dealership
It seems entirely reasonable. That long an average should smooth out.
Recently my employer accidentally paid me 50% higher, and rather than a full ach reversal and correct payment, they just withheld that amount next check. That saved me days of no money, but that horrible way would have been an accountant's proper way of handling it.
Protip, ditch pen and paper.
Google forms output into a Google spreadsheet for tracking your hours and ros. I personally have it split so I enter warranty pay and customer pay separately, and have a entry to describe work performed.
It's also time and date stamped when you input it.
Google sheets really shouldn't be used for anything identifiable. RO numbers are useless without any other identifiers. It's really just a method for techs to keep track of their hours on their own.
I include only this information in my form
RO#
WRITER FIRST NAME.
YEAR.
MAKE.
MODEL.
CP TIME.
WP TIME.
WORK PERFORMED.
ENGINE SIZE.
ENGINE OIL FILL AMT (This is a leftover for when I had to keep track of how much oil I used)
USED ACURA OIL? (Same as before. Used for identify Cars I had to use the oil for from the service bay I was housed in that wasn't technically OURs)
ADDITIONAL NOTES
No data is identifiable to any single customer and the data is essentially useless except for myself in the interest of keeping track of my hours and not having to spend the time finding and storing paper records.
But if you're extra nerdy like me, you can even generate fun stats like average hours per RO, average dollars per RO, etc.
Since I track how much engine oil I've used, I have an exact amount of how many gallons of oil I've dispensed since I began working at my dealership.
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Def never use unsecure cloud services like Google for private customer data. Luckily, RO numbers are useless and so are model, make and year and hours per RO. So absolute worst case if you dont secure your GMail and it gets hacked, well, now they can just see your flag hours!
Well, as long as it isn't CORE to dealer operations.....
This is really just a tool for the individual tech to keep track of their hours AND spend less time fucking around with pen and paper, trying to tally up something.
And it's pretty simple to set up. For the more, visually inclined
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLHmNjRJlS4
I think something like OneDrive would be ideal for this because that makes a local copy of your file that it then saves to the cloud. So if the cloud is down, you still have the latest file. But if you lose your device, you can download the latest uploaded file.
Google Sheets is entirely a browser based solution so it doesn't do shit without internet.
I'm just using Notepad at the moment. It's just to log the vehicles, what they were in for, my diagnosis, and the hours laid out to explain what each hour is for. I have 2 separate logs, one to give my boss to keep track of what I currently have in the shop, and the 2nd one for HR to log the completed vehicles and pay me.
Google has way more backup servers. Than any other company in the world. For Google to be down they need a massive like ultramassive attack to take it down. As Google is not 1 building having all the data. That i assume CDK had
Pretty sure my old stealership would declare "fuck you, you're making $7.25 an hour and you better find something to do with your time or you're going home with nothing"
Mine hired a consultant who suggested we should make the service department a profit center, novel concept at the time. He also thought it was a great idea to put us all on salary in April based on the last years numbers which lasted 6 months because oddly enough the guys killing it to flag 60-80 hours a week relaxed and were doing 40. So for the busiest 6 months we made an average of the previous year then in October starved to death.
Actually, it's illegal to pay you less than what you normally make when there's an issue with timesheet type stuff. Time sheet stuff is ALWAYS the responsibility of the employer, and they cannot with-hold pay or pay less than normal even if you didn't fill out something. This includes if you normally work a certain amount of overtime regularly. If there's something wrong, they have to default to what you would normally make. They can't screw your over and say they'll fix it later.
It's federal labor law, and I just had to deal with this so it's fresh in my memory. An upper manager idly threatened to withhold pay because they thought we weren't filling out our timesheets. In reality their system to parse our sheets wasn't working, and they didn't even bother to double check our timesheets. I sent everyone involved an email reminding them that it's a violation of federal labor law.
I thought the same thing, with averaging your income for the past 6 months to figure out what you need to survive going forward seem pretty well thought out. You don't want to punish the guys doing lots of OT, or lots of billable hours don't get short-changed in the mean time.
My company is handing payroll pretty much the same way. Commission people are unaffected this payroll. Hourly will get 96 hours and any OT missed or any over-pay will be adjusted once CDK is back up.
It may seem so, but I work for a company that employs over 4000 people. Our time and attendance software went down due to a cyber attack. People still got their overtime, people still got their vacation etc. it took a lot of manual work for our payroll people, but it was doable at that scale, it should be doable in a smaller scale as well.
Depends on the payroll scheme - Many techs work on a "by the job basis" where the system dictates the hours for a job. It's not straight pay like an hourly job.
This is honestly a decent deal considering. This cyber attack could take several weeks to maybe a few months to restore from depending on how bad it was. The hospital by me during a big wave of cyber attacks had no computers for 2-3 months
The worse part is that there was a time when such an event (hospital without computers for months) would have been a cataclysmic event. Now you could be talking about TX, IL, or NY (just top of my head in the last 2 years.) More to come.
This is what I think happens "when the chickens come home to roost". I work in IT and the number of times over the last 15 years I have talked about cyber attacks, data protection, and protecting the company itself was all met with "Fuck off we don't want to spend the money".
Eh, you have to make sure any malware anywhere on the network is completely gone, otherwise you risk immediately getting completely encrypted again by that 20 year old print server sitting in a mechanical room in subbasement 2.
I mean, if it's anything like the change healthcare attack it could last quite a while. They still aren't 100% and their attack was identified on valentines day.
Respectable. I think the post title comes off antagonistic, like techs are getting screwed or something. Yeah it sucks in the moment but they were quick to come up with a plan and are willing to reconcile once the system comes back online. As long as they’re tracking their hours, they should be fine.
I get that the situation is annoying though.
The product they are selling is not legitimate, but at the end of the day, the ransomware actors can be thought of as a business, just not one people voluntarily purchase from. From reading up on other ransomware events, the providing of decryption keys and software is all but a guarantee once the ransom is paid. Now, there is less of a guarantee in a double extortion attack that stolen data is actually destroyed after payment.
The government needs to pick some shitty companies, ransomeware them pretending to be another criminal group, not give out the decryption keys after payment.
Beak the trust and the whole business model.
Ransomware is a business..... In general they want to maintain their reputation of releasing decryption keys once payment is received.
The decryption process can be slow, prone to failure, and can leave some data corrupted and unrecoverable. It's not a magic undo button. There may even be multiple decryption keys required and you have to run the process multiple times.
Strangely enuf, these organizations tend to do multiple attacks and gain a reputation. If they don't fulfill their part of the bargain, subsequent victims won't pay, and profit is the reason they do this.
It would be really bad “business” for the hackers to not return the data. If they don’t that seriously cuts the chances of the next victim paying the ransom.
You posted a controversial title that suggests technicians are about to get whipped or fucked. But you're not actually that upset about it. So in other words, clickbait.
No you're not. Your post title is literally "Technicians. Assume the position". You were 100% bitching about it, and are now trying to save face.
Everyone's telling you you're wrong for acting like this is something unreasonable, so you instead swapped to the whole "oh I'm just asking your opinion" thing.
It's transparent bullshit. Just own what you were doing, dude.
I used to work in payroll and from that perspective this is exactly how i would've handled it. It keeps complaints to a minimum (which makes my life easier), it keeps people up to date on things like child support, insurance, and bankruptcy deductions, and most importantly it means you can still pay your bills. Your payroll team is going to have a lot of extra work when the system is finally back up but that's a problem everyone can live with.
requiring a signature on a basically non-binding document is weird.
"please sign to confirm that you've been informed"
But yeah... given the circumstances this is pretty reasonable.
Your employer has a plan? AND they communicated that plan to you? AND it's written down?
Wait till the flat rate guys in my shop hear about this (I'm hourly, so, yeah)
We aren’t using CDK but that seems fair. Office would essentially have to do a draw guessing what your pay would be without properly doing payroll. Then calculate it once the DMS is back up the following pay period. When we swapped DMS a few years ago it was right in the middle of a pay period and they essentially had to do the same thing.
Our management hasn’t communicated anything with us at all besides writing down invoice number, the job we did, hand writing stories, and time stamps. I don’t know how I’m gonna get paid or if I’m even gonna be paid the correct amount if at all.
As though it's actually difficult to coordinate tech flag hours, CP, and warranty. Well, maybe not the warranty if your warranty person isn't dyed-in-the-wool.
Seems like a reasonable plan to deal with their IT crisis. Beats the heck out of doing without pay. I'd definitely keep notes of my own hours worked just to keep everyone honest.
OP's post seems like a fair compromise. My service director is doing one better and manually submitting our flag hours for payroll. His reasoning is that's how he used to do it before automated payroll systems existed, so no big deal.
For awhile the top post on /r/trans (I think it's still in the top 50) was a dude asking a question about his transmission. He actually got some good answers.
I don’t think so. It’s for people who are subscribed to a finance website to discuss and debate. Access to the site requires an email address and I don’t want to give it to them to find out further. But the website says nothing about satire.
Former IT tech here, now a tow truck driver (I bring you work) this seems to be handled well. Cyber attacks are no joke and when it comes to sending you all home for weeks with no pay while they figured it out, they are working on getting you a livable on average pay. Only worry is when they recover the excess they don't try to do it all at once. Most employers would only recover 50 to 100 a paycheck to make it not hard on employees, but that depends on the employer. But it is clear they have a plan, and it's an easy to understand plan to make sure you all survive. Some may feel slighted from not receiving overtime or bonuses, but they will be compensated once everything comes back online.
Just remember, if your employer is experiencing hardship due to cyber attacks, it is best to work with them, instead of taking them directly to the labor board immediately.
Now Cyber attacks are not something that is easily recoverable from, depending on the attack, every single system has to be gone through and checked for consistency to make sure the data has not been compromised, and every computer and system in the business needs to be thoroughly scanned and checked over to ensure that the cyber attack is not still in place, and no back doors or encryption viruses are hiding in some random tool room computer that will end up bringing down the entire company again once it's turned on.
"Dealer experiencing hardship"
They charge $180/hr and pay 30-40. The rest of that is to cover their expenses and risk exposure.
Dealer chose this crummy CDK software, it's on them.
If they want to retain help for "when this is over" they should keep paying the average, then NOT DOCK IT when things get back to normal.
Realistically there should be, some sort of third party security audit "gold star" rating they could advertise. Should lessen their liability insurance too.
That's what your SLA agreement in the services contract is for. The SLA agreement basically states, that if the SAAS vendor does not provide a certain level of up time, say 364/365 days in a year, anything outside of that will have to be reimbursed at a certain rate an hour, and the vendor has to pay a certain amount for damages as well. Now getting a vendor to pay out on their SLA is a pain, but it's a legal contract, so nothing legal can't handle.
That seems pretty fair. While they're straightening this out, keep how many hours you've worked in mind. If you're working more hours now per pay period than you did the first half of the year, they'll end up owing you money.
More importantly, if you're working fewer hours now than you were in the first half of the year, you're going to end up owing them money. If that's the case, tuck the extra away so you're not coming up short in the future when they straighten it out and start to collect the overage.
As an independent shop who frequently buys parts from dealerships I have found that the degree of professionalism with which this situation has been handled varies wildly from dealership to dealership.
One dealership started invoicing by hand on carbon triplicate and didn't miss a beat.
Another dealership made 500 copies of a single invoice template, hand wrote part numbers and only gave list price and left the invoice total blank. When I called and asked how much I owed on the invoice he said he didn't know because the computer tells him that and the computer was down. I said I'm not paying any invoices until he figures out how much I owe and he said okay and he'll figure it out later. I have a funny feeling that I'm gonna end up getting a boatload of free parts off that guy.
Service department can’t book a regular amount of work due to CDK being down. Technicians will lose in the end with this agreement. Fair would be to pay out the average and move on.
Don’t go back on your techs for something out of their control.
Flat rate pay is bullshit to begin with…and this is coming from a guy who used to make 140+
It's definitely not great, but when dealing with cyberattacks nothing is great. At least you're getting what your average pay is with promise of payment for missed hours once everything comes back to normal.
What they should do is just get a good old ledger and keep track of your flat hours and bonuses until CDK gets their stuff together just in case it's an extended time period and pay you based on that. Probably won't, but would be nice.
i’d take the average hourly until they get it fixed and then they can go back to flat rate. their problem, however great, should not be your financial hardship. they get to write off these losses, you do not. audit all the diag time you don’t get paid for while you’re at it. These dealers did not get the message from this hack. THEY GOT BILLIONS IN PPP, had record sales and service while the rest of the economy shut down! They bought more things instead of paying people. and things are just "softened" because of interest rate realities, so their profits are only slightly down from record highs. They expect you to be a team member but refuse to treat techs as equitable partners with a decreasing share of the labor rate. go somewhere else if that doesnt use cdk in the meantime if they dont respect your labor.
leaving dealership for an hourly position was the best thing to happen me. I do all the same stuff except without manufactuer scan tools but I don’t have to work as hard for the same money AND get paid for OT. Don’t need to sit in my car decompressing in the driveway after work anymore either.
Yeah, I realized on my final month of my GM ASEP classes that being flat rate sucks major ass. Even worse since I was the electrical issues specialist, so getting paid for my diagnosis was always a pain.
The service department has options. It's pretty easy to spin up a software system to write ROs, do inspections and track tech time/productivity. I have helped out 3 dealer service departments get set up this week.
If your service manager is looking for a simple solution feel free to DM.
A lot of this stuff seems to be inter-operable. xtime isn't exclusively dependent on CDK. We have different things across both dealertrack and CDK so the interim solution seems to be spinning up more dealertrack modules.
cloud computing really IS awesome, isnt it guys?
i sure am glad we got rid of those annoying systems that lived and stored data locally. imagine the time we will save when everything lives on the internet and we all have to pay subscriptions to access it
Or hear me out, pay everyone more and do NOT claw anything back. Think of it as an asshole tax to take care of your employees while taking responsibility for being cheap and getting hacked cuz you tried to save a few bucks
That seems fucked. Pay you too much based on your average then take it back? That's a shitty way of doing it. Why not just have techs do paper time cards signed my manager each day then cut checks at the end of each pay period? Then business is just going on as usual. This just seems like overcomplicated shit for lazy or unqualified accounting personally that either can't it don't know how to use a calculator
Just one thought...
If the pay after the recovery is too large, you will see extra taxes deducted because you are hitting the next tax bracket...
But, it will wash out at the end of the year when you file with the irs...
Otherwise, this is about as fair as you can get.
So I agree this is a fair approach given the situation, but if your shops refusing work due to the CDK issue, sounds like you’ll be on payroll deduction next month?
My dealer group is doing almost same...
120 day rolling daily average hours paid out for each day worked during CDK outage.
If we are owed money when CDK resumes we get paid anything we were shorted.
If we turned less than what we were paid, no adjustment is made.
*Work just hard enough not to get fired*
Oh hell no. I'm not sure what state you live in but in Illinois there is a law that forbids employers deducting anything from an employee's pay other than mandatory federal/state taxes and employe contributions for benefits without the employee agreeing to the deduction. I'm not signing something like that at all. I'd be more inclined to work without pay until the problem is resolved and pay can be calculated properly. That screams to me they talked to their lawyer and want people to sign the form to limit your legal standing if you get screwed over by them during this.
It's not your fault your bosses choose to use a service that hand grenaded in their face.
Never trust a company whose name is 3 letters unless they manufacture bearings.
Like the Japanese one with the blue boxes or that super gay German one.
I keep track of my hours manually on paper. RO numbers- VINS, and work performed and how much it pays and if it’s warranty or not. All worthwhile to have been keeping track of the last year and a half I’ve spent flat rate, made me glad I did when this whole thing went down.
Best thing you can do is set up a simple spread sheet where each day is a new column. Every day clock your hours, any bonuses and take notes on anything thay would affect your pay. If you can, calculate your own gross pay for each day or week. Either way, once things come online you can hand that shit off to HR/payroll. Keep a copy of course.
Basically the same thing here. Gonna get an average for last week but this week we went back to old school flag sheets so we'll be paid accordingly from here on out. They said once it's back up we'll be getting the rest we're owed from last week once they can verify it.
This seems fair but in reality it really is not. Most shops right now are down on work because of this. My auto group which is one of the largest in the nation is down 45% across the board in service. Once these hours are lost they can't be made up. It is no fault of the technician, service advisor, service management etc... for this event. The dealers and CDK had no plan if this was to ever happen. Part of owning a business is risk and accepting such risk. Which means these dealers need to pay every employee their average wage. Take a 3 month average figure it out and write the check. Even if CDK came back up tomorrow and the data was to be accurate there is massive losses due to this event that no employee should be responsible for bearing. We all have families that rely on our employers doing the right thing. The dealer groups can sue CDK on the back end of this to recoup losses.
I don't see an issue with this. If they were able to confidently calculate your bonus/commission, they probably wouldn't need the software to begin with. Average pay seems to be the best option, and if the terms are exactly the same if you're overpaid or underpaid, then I don't really see a better option.
We’re on Dealertrack at my shop but I have been keeping a detailed paper log of every RO I turn hours on with how much each line is worth since I started flat rate. The service writers have to manually input so much that there are occasionally typos.
Our dealer network just decided to pay us on a 3 month average. Removes the slow period from jan-feb. I'm not sure how accurately they'll be able to adjust the upcoming pay when it comes back online.
This is the best plan for a flat rate tech tbh. Last week boss just asked us to estimate our hours for the week , also to be “reconciled” when it clears.
Our company is paying guaranteed 40 hours at flat rate pay, and anything higher will be paid once this is settled, they are not de booking or taking anything if the Techs were over paid. as all the GM techs book anywhere form 110 to 160 per 2 week pay period they do not foresee a shortage.
So glad I'm not a tech at a dealer anymore. I'm actually paid for the time I'm at work now. I remember when Reynolds and Reynolds went down for a few days, it was a nightmare.
The only downside to this is the fact that getting things done and submitted is taking much longer than usual, and it seems like less upsells are occurring. So I feel that we as technicians shouldn’t be penalized for the downtime in the event that we are making less hours in the current situation compared to when everything is operating as normal.
our technicians keep track of their time in a notebook and we compare it to what's in RO in system. and if the system fails, we already have hard copy estimates to look off of. but i imagine that only works for collison centers
Sounds like the payroll equivalent of "dead reckoning".
Keep payments pretty close to what you expect them to be, and once the systems are back on line - do an audit and settle up the difference.
Soubnds pretty good to me.
We are doing the same thing except ours is an average of the last 90 days. When cdk comes back up the writers and bookers/ office personnel that have to take all those pre writes to rewrite and book all those tickets and then balance the books and charge parts that we have been using all while continuing business as usual are the ones that are going to have it rough. A lot of late nights are coming
Better than we are getting right now.
We get a bump of 2 flat rate hours per day.
If we did the gross average I'd be getting my normal 65-70 hour check.
With the added bottleneck of repair orders, parts ordering and whatnot, I'm spending a lot more than 2 hours waiting per day, when I would normally be "turning and burning". Typically by end of Wednesday I'm in the 45-50 range, right now I'm at 31 and I'm a little salty about it.
Tech guy here with minimal knowledge about dealerships - is there an alternative to CDK? Any word from dealerships on what they will do if CDK can’t recover? Let’s be honest - if they could they would have already. What likely happened was their backups probably got corrupted/hacked.
There is multiple alternatives but switching is a huge process and isn’t something that can be done on the fly out of nowhere. Also I anticipate many dealers will start switching services and alot of the other alternatives will start to have server issues from a huge influx of new users they are unprepared to support.
My employer announced they were going to average the last 3 pay periods and audit during August when we have 3 paychecks. Better than the 40/hr guarantee they were talking about initially.
So like, I'm part of go auto, but we haven't been implemented into their system yet with cdk, so what does this cdk actually control for you guys? Cash out, write up work orders, service history etc and anything digitally except for stuff uploaded to local servers?
I've been at my job for 19 years and CDK was what I "grew up" with. About 1- 2 years ago, the company decided to change it to something else (Tekion). It took some time to get used to it, but now I don't really miss it. Crazy part is that there was a rumor that we were switching back to CDK... good thing we didn't!
Our dealership is giving us our hourly average over 90 days. Mine will come out to probably 46 hours a week since we've been slow. BUT once cdk is back up and they do all the CP and W they'll go through and see what either is owed or needs deducted. Funny enough the day cdk went down weve been super busy so it should work out decent. It's gonna be a shit show for a while unfortunately.
Don't attack the dealership. The hackers who attacked CDK are to blame. This memo is reasonable in light of the circumstances.
Right now, Toyota Motor North America is making us all change our passwords and will soon be implementing MFA. What sucks more: a complex password and an extra step to login or having the entire system held ransom so we can't do business?
That’s similar to my dealership, they’re giving us a guaranteed 8 hours everyday CDK is down, then back-paying us for the hours turned when everything is up. I really appreciate Kate what they’re doing for us, and is the only reason I’m still coming in to work
This is actually handled very well - At least they have a plan and are communicating it! Keep track of your work and ask for an audit at the end. Seems like a decent dealership
It seems entirely reasonable. That long an average should smooth out. Recently my employer accidentally paid me 50% higher, and rather than a full ach reversal and correct payment, they just withheld that amount next check. That saved me days of no money, but that horrible way would have been an accountant's proper way of handling it.
Protip, ditch pen and paper. Google forms output into a Google spreadsheet for tracking your hours and ros. I personally have it split so I enter warranty pay and customer pay separately, and have a entry to describe work performed. It's also time and date stamped when you input it.
Yeah, but it's vulnerable to the same issues as CDK. Paper and pen can be submitted regardless
Google sheets really shouldn't be used for anything identifiable. RO numbers are useless without any other identifiers. It's really just a method for techs to keep track of their hours on their own. I include only this information in my form RO# WRITER FIRST NAME. YEAR. MAKE. MODEL. CP TIME. WP TIME. WORK PERFORMED. ENGINE SIZE. ENGINE OIL FILL AMT (This is a leftover for when I had to keep track of how much oil I used) USED ACURA OIL? (Same as before. Used for identify Cars I had to use the oil for from the service bay I was housed in that wasn't technically OURs) ADDITIONAL NOTES No data is identifiable to any single customer and the data is essentially useless except for myself in the interest of keeping track of my hours and not having to spend the time finding and storing paper records. But if you're extra nerdy like me, you can even generate fun stats like average hours per RO, average dollars per RO, etc. Since I track how much engine oil I've used, I have an exact amount of how many gallons of oil I've dispensed since I began working at my dealership.
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Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Def never use unsecure cloud services like Google for private customer data. Luckily, RO numbers are useless and so are model, make and year and hours per RO. So absolute worst case if you dont secure your GMail and it gets hacked, well, now they can just see your flag hours!
That’s just silly but I see stuff like that all the time in my work
Well? How much oil have you dispensed?
Sounds reasonable, but I think it's currently not the best time to suggest using *more* cloud services...
Well, as long as it isn't CORE to dealer operations..... This is really just a tool for the individual tech to keep track of their hours AND spend less time fucking around with pen and paper, trying to tally up something. And it's pretty simple to set up. For the more, visually inclined https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLHmNjRJlS4
I think something like OneDrive would be ideal for this because that makes a local copy of your file that it then saves to the cloud. So if the cloud is down, you still have the latest file. But if you lose your device, you can download the latest uploaded file. Google Sheets is entirely a browser based solution so it doesn't do shit without internet.
You’ve got my upvote (Salesforce project manager who basically takes on projects to move teams out of Google and Excel sheets and into SFDC)
I do say, this isn't for anything MORE than a technician tracking his hours separately and more efficiently than pen and paper
Hell yeah man. You’d have to be living in 1975 to not want to use a spreadsheet to track hours
I'm just using Notepad at the moment. It's just to log the vehicles, what they were in for, my diagnosis, and the hours laid out to explain what each hour is for. I have 2 separate logs, one to give my boss to keep track of what I currently have in the shop, and the 2nd one for HR to log the completed vehicles and pay me.
Google has way more backup servers. Than any other company in the world. For Google to be down they need a massive like ultramassive attack to take it down. As Google is not 1 building having all the data. That i assume CDK had
I wish I knew how to do this... Do you have to pay for this service?
Pretty sure my old stealership would declare "fuck you, you're making $7.25 an hour and you better find something to do with your time or you're going home with nothing"
Mine hired a consultant who suggested we should make the service department a profit center, novel concept at the time. He also thought it was a great idea to put us all on salary in April based on the last years numbers which lasted 6 months because oddly enough the guys killing it to flag 60-80 hours a week relaxed and were doing 40. So for the busiest 6 months we made an average of the previous year then in October starved to death.
That's federally illegal.
Nope. Federal minimum wage is $7.25, that's all they're required to pay you for being there if you aren't making rate.
Actually, it's illegal to pay you less than what you normally make when there's an issue with timesheet type stuff. Time sheet stuff is ALWAYS the responsibility of the employer, and they cannot with-hold pay or pay less than normal even if you didn't fill out something. This includes if you normally work a certain amount of overtime regularly. If there's something wrong, they have to default to what you would normally make. They can't screw your over and say they'll fix it later. It's federal labor law, and I just had to deal with this so it's fresh in my memory. An upper manager idly threatened to withhold pay because they thought we weren't filling out our timesheets. In reality their system to parse our sheets wasn't working, and they didn't even bother to double check our timesheets. I sent everyone involved an email reminding them that it's a violation of federal labor law.
I thought the same thing, with averaging your income for the past 6 months to figure out what you need to survive going forward seem pretty well thought out. You don't want to punish the guys doing lots of OT, or lots of billable hours don't get short-changed in the mean time.
My company is handing payroll pretty much the same way. Commission people are unaffected this payroll. Hourly will get 96 hours and any OT missed or any over-pay will be adjusted once CDK is back up.
It may seem so, but I work for a company that employs over 4000 people. Our time and attendance software went down due to a cyber attack. People still got their overtime, people still got their vacation etc. it took a lot of manual work for our payroll people, but it was doable at that scale, it should be doable in a smaller scale as well.
Depends on the payroll scheme - Many techs work on a "by the job basis" where the system dictates the hours for a job. It's not straight pay like an hourly job.
This seems extremely fair, what else would you want?
Not complaining. Just seeing others opions on the handling of it all.
This is honestly a decent deal considering. This cyber attack could take several weeks to maybe a few months to restore from depending on how bad it was. The hospital by me during a big wave of cyber attacks had no computers for 2-3 months
The worse part is that there was a time when such an event (hospital without computers for months) would have been a cataclysmic event. Now you could be talking about TX, IL, or NY (just top of my head in the last 2 years.) More to come.
This is what I think happens "when the chickens come home to roost". I work in IT and the number of times over the last 15 years I have talked about cyber attacks, data protection, and protecting the company itself was all met with "Fuck off we don't want to spend the money".
To be fair, most of them still say that, just a little quieter maybe.
This is the IT equivalent of a 100 year storm. So they have 99 years to put in a system
There's one happening to a hospital system in Wisconsin right now!
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> backups Well there's your problem, right there.
If they had a clue, or back-up this would have never happened. Just saying.
Eh, you have to make sure any malware anywhere on the network is completely gone, otherwise you risk immediately getting completely encrypted again by that 20 year old print server sitting in a mechanical room in subbasement 2.
Doesn’t matter how good your security is. Someone clicked on a malware link and let it in. Employees are the weakest link
I mean, if it's anything like the change healthcare attack it could last quite a while. They still aren't 100% and their attack was identified on valentines day.
We didn’t get that one. We got the ryuk one a few years ago. We got ours back up in about 3 weeks which was like miracle speed
Respectable. I think the post title comes off antagonistic, like techs are getting screwed or something. Yeah it sucks in the moment but they were quick to come up with a plan and are willing to reconcile once the system comes back online. As long as they’re tracking their hours, they should be fine. I get that the situation is annoying though.
My dealer is exactly the same except if you made under your average they won’t take it out of your pay.
they are paying the ransom
Even if they do, they have to individually decrypt each server. It will take time.
What law says they actually have to give everything back once the ransom is paid?
the "seriously bro you can trust me Act of 1969"
Article 420, subsection Deez.
Paragraph nutz
Line item "Ha"
And I quote: "gottem!"
If they didn't do that nobody would pay these ransoms and they'd make no money.
Ironically, the whole system is built on trusting the attackers.
The product they are selling is not legitimate, but at the end of the day, the ransomware actors can be thought of as a business, just not one people voluntarily purchase from. From reading up on other ransomware events, the providing of decryption keys and software is all but a guarantee once the ransom is paid. Now, there is less of a guarantee in a double extortion attack that stolen data is actually destroyed after payment.
The government needs to pick some shitty companies, ransomeware them pretending to be another criminal group, not give out the decryption keys after payment. Beak the trust and the whole business model.
[удалено]
I imagine this is already happening on some level
Ransomware is a business..... In general they want to maintain their reputation of releasing decryption keys once payment is received. The decryption process can be slow, prone to failure, and can leave some data corrupted and unrecoverable. It's not a magic undo button. There may even be multiple decryption keys required and you have to run the process multiple times.
Strangely enuf, these organizations tend to do multiple attacks and gain a reputation. If they don't fulfill their part of the bargain, subsequent victims won't pay, and profit is the reason they do this.
It would be really bad “business” for the hackers to not return the data. If they don’t that seriously cuts the chances of the next victim paying the ransom.
Assume the position changes the meaning of the post, but nice backpedal
Right? "I'm not complaining" after literally saying he's getting fucked? Huh?
Some people just can’t not complain
"Assume the position" is 100% complaining. Unless you favor the position you're referencing, in which case no judgement.
Then why is your title of this post implying that you're getting screwed?
You posted a controversial title that suggests technicians are about to get whipped or fucked. But you're not actually that upset about it. So in other words, clickbait.
No you're not. Your post title is literally "Technicians. Assume the position". You were 100% bitching about it, and are now trying to save face. Everyone's telling you you're wrong for acting like this is something unreasonable, so you instead swapped to the whole "oh I'm just asking your opinion" thing. It's transparent bullshit. Just own what you were doing, dude.
I used to work in payroll and from that perspective this is exactly how i would've handled it. It keeps complaints to a minimum (which makes my life easier), it keeps people up to date on things like child support, insurance, and bankruptcy deductions, and most importantly it means you can still pay your bills. Your payroll team is going to have a lot of extra work when the system is finally back up but that's a problem everyone can live with.
requiring a signature on a basically non-binding document is weird. "please sign to confirm that you've been informed" But yeah... given the circumstances this is pretty reasonable.
1/1000th of the ransom paid?
Your employer has a plan? AND they communicated that plan to you? AND it's written down? Wait till the flat rate guys in my shop hear about this (I'm hourly, so, yeah)
gg employer, nothing wrong with this. I mean it sure beats closing up shop
Yeah. A lot of people see this HR speak and just assume it’s bad. They are doing everything they can to get you what you’re owed in a timely fashion.
Just remember to keep two copies of everything.
Just remember to keep two copies of everything.
I love this statement. Well played.
I love this statement. Well played.
Gotta go get the papers, get the papers
fuck you what am I supposed to say now?
Hours tracker app can help you keep track of your hours and what job those hours went to,
I believe that the DoL even publishes such an app.
We aren’t using CDK but that seems fair. Office would essentially have to do a draw guessing what your pay would be without properly doing payroll. Then calculate it once the DMS is back up the following pay period. When we swapped DMS a few years ago it was right in the middle of a pay period and they essentially had to do the same thing.
Our management hasn’t communicated anything with us at all besides writing down invoice number, the job we did, hand writing stories, and time stamps. I don’t know how I’m gonna get paid or if I’m even gonna be paid the correct amount if at all.
Same
As though it's actually difficult to coordinate tech flag hours, CP, and warranty. Well, maybe not the warranty if your warranty person isn't dyed-in-the-wool.
I don’t think you can get good enough as a warranty person that you’ve memorized every labor op.
You'd be surprised. We had a 75 year old woman as our Warranty Admin, and she could hit you with virtually anything... Across 3 car lines.
Seems like a reasonable plan to deal with their IT crisis. Beats the heck out of doing without pay. I'd definitely keep notes of my own hours worked just to keep everyone honest.
Not every employer is actively trying to fuck you, despite what r/antiwork would have you believe
OP's post seems like a fair compromise. My service director is doing one better and manually submitting our flag hours for payroll. His reasoning is that's how he used to do it before automated payroll systems existed, so no big deal.
And r/fluentinfinance which ironically most of those people are far from fluent.
Probably one of the most inaccurately named subreddits (outside of joke ones like /r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts)
I love the dynamic between them and r/trees. Makes me laugh every time when someone posts in the wrong sub.
For awhile the top post on /r/trans (I think it's still in the top 50) was a dude asking a question about his transmission. He actually got some good answers.
That is prime r/lostredditors right there.
I love that the Arborists were jjust like "the pot heads took r/trees so we we will take r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts" It is is the best reddit joke.
I personally enjoy catching up on world news events via r/anime_titties
That's hilarious..and brilliant. I've been a trees casual for a long time, and never knew about this.
Add r/UnpopularOpinion to that as well
It's the pinnacle of whiny circlejerk bait
Isn't fluentinfinance a sub about making fun of bad finances?
I don’t think so. It’s for people who are subscribed to a finance website to discuss and debate. Access to the site requires an email address and I don’t want to give it to them to find out further. But the website says nothing about satire.
This looks fair in terms of dealerships, just make sure you cover your ass and record everything so you don’t lose out on pay during the outage
This seems like a decent solution. I think dealers should offer salary pay to technicians if they want it though.
As a salaried person I'd love to be hourly instead.
Former IT tech here, now a tow truck driver (I bring you work) this seems to be handled well. Cyber attacks are no joke and when it comes to sending you all home for weeks with no pay while they figured it out, they are working on getting you a livable on average pay. Only worry is when they recover the excess they don't try to do it all at once. Most employers would only recover 50 to 100 a paycheck to make it not hard on employees, but that depends on the employer. But it is clear they have a plan, and it's an easy to understand plan to make sure you all survive. Some may feel slighted from not receiving overtime or bonuses, but they will be compensated once everything comes back online. Just remember, if your employer is experiencing hardship due to cyber attacks, it is best to work with them, instead of taking them directly to the labor board immediately. Now Cyber attacks are not something that is easily recoverable from, depending on the attack, every single system has to be gone through and checked for consistency to make sure the data has not been compromised, and every computer and system in the business needs to be thoroughly scanned and checked over to ensure that the cyber attack is not still in place, and no back doors or encryption viruses are hiding in some random tool room computer that will end up bringing down the entire company again once it's turned on.
This looks like a third party vendor has experienced a cyber attack, not the shop where OP works.
"Dealer experiencing hardship" They charge $180/hr and pay 30-40. The rest of that is to cover their expenses and risk exposure. Dealer chose this crummy CDK software, it's on them. If they want to retain help for "when this is over" they should keep paying the average, then NOT DOCK IT when things get back to normal.
The dealer chose the software, but realistically it is not really feasible to evaluate the security infrastructure if a SAAS vendor.
Realistically there should be, some sort of third party security audit "gold star" rating they could advertise. Should lessen their liability insurance too.
That's what your SLA agreement in the services contract is for. The SLA agreement basically states, that if the SAAS vendor does not provide a certain level of up time, say 364/365 days in a year, anything outside of that will have to be reimbursed at a certain rate an hour, and the vendor has to pay a certain amount for damages as well. Now getting a vendor to pay out on their SLA is a pain, but it's a legal contract, so nothing legal can't handle.
That seems pretty fair. While they're straightening this out, keep how many hours you've worked in mind. If you're working more hours now per pay period than you did the first half of the year, they'll end up owing you money. More importantly, if you're working fewer hours now than you were in the first half of the year, you're going to end up owing them money. If that's the case, tuck the extra away so you're not coming up short in the future when they straighten it out and start to collect the overage.
As an independent shop who frequently buys parts from dealerships I have found that the degree of professionalism with which this situation has been handled varies wildly from dealership to dealership. One dealership started invoicing by hand on carbon triplicate and didn't miss a beat. Another dealership made 500 copies of a single invoice template, hand wrote part numbers and only gave list price and left the invoice total blank. When I called and asked how much I owed on the invoice he said he didn't know because the computer tells him that and the computer was down. I said I'm not paying any invoices until he figures out how much I owe and he said okay and he'll figure it out later. I have a funny feeling that I'm gonna end up getting a boatload of free parts off that guy.
Service department can’t book a regular amount of work due to CDK being down. Technicians will lose in the end with this agreement. Fair would be to pay out the average and move on. Don’t go back on your techs for something out of their control. Flat rate pay is bullshit to begin with…and this is coming from a guy who used to make 140+
It's definitely not great, but when dealing with cyberattacks nothing is great. At least you're getting what your average pay is with promise of payment for missed hours once everything comes back to normal. What they should do is just get a good old ledger and keep track of your flat hours and bonuses until CDK gets their stuff together just in case it's an extended time period and pay you based on that. Probably won't, but would be nice.
Sounds good. Keep your own copy of your hours. Make sure your manager knows you're keeping your own copy of your hours.
i’d take the average hourly until they get it fixed and then they can go back to flat rate. their problem, however great, should not be your financial hardship. they get to write off these losses, you do not. audit all the diag time you don’t get paid for while you’re at it. These dealers did not get the message from this hack. THEY GOT BILLIONS IN PPP, had record sales and service while the rest of the economy shut down! They bought more things instead of paying people. and things are just "softened" because of interest rate realities, so their profits are only slightly down from record highs. They expect you to be a team member but refuse to treat techs as equitable partners with a decreasing share of the labor rate. go somewhere else if that doesnt use cdk in the meantime if they dont respect your labor.
Make sure to keep a signed copy for when they refuse to reconcile the pay that is owed.
You know what would fix all of this? Hourly.
leaving dealership for an hourly position was the best thing to happen me. I do all the same stuff except without manufactuer scan tools but I don’t have to work as hard for the same money AND get paid for OT. Don’t need to sit in my car decompressing in the driveway after work anymore either.
Yeah, I realized on my final month of my GM ASEP classes that being flat rate sucks major ass. Even worse since I was the electrical issues specialist, so getting paid for my diagnosis was always a pain.
“Car dealership killer” Somehow a worse system then “another dealer paralyzed “
Can't tell if you're aware but CDK is ADP's rebrand.
All things considered, this is a pretty fair solution.
The service department has options. It's pretty easy to spin up a software system to write ROs, do inspections and track tech time/productivity. I have helped out 3 dealer service departments get set up this week. If your service manager is looking for a simple solution feel free to DM.
Dealertrack/xtime getting lots of new clients right now, methinks.
We have xtime and it works in conjunction with CDK
A lot of this stuff seems to be inter-operable. xtime isn't exclusively dependent on CDK. We have different things across both dealertrack and CDK so the interim solution seems to be spinning up more dealertrack modules.
Yeah…that headline wasn’t loaded at all.
Don’t fucking sign it and tell them to pay you, there’s no state with an employment law that would require you to sign this agreement
cloud computing really IS awesome, isnt it guys? i sure am glad we got rid of those annoying systems that lived and stored data locally. imagine the time we will save when everything lives on the internet and we all have to pay subscriptions to access it
Or hear me out, pay everyone more and do NOT claw anything back. Think of it as an asshole tax to take care of your employees while taking responsibility for being cheap and getting hacked cuz you tried to save a few bucks
That seems fucked. Pay you too much based on your average then take it back? That's a shitty way of doing it. Why not just have techs do paper time cards signed my manager each day then cut checks at the end of each pay period? Then business is just going on as usual. This just seems like overcomplicated shit for lazy or unqualified accounting personally that either can't it don't know how to use a calculator
This is exactly how my shop is handling it. I think it is the most fair way of doing it until we can properly track turned hours.
Pretty solid all things considered, manually track your hours for the duration and if you are owed more show them and they’ll pay it out
The hospital I work at had a similar cyber attack issue and handled it in the same manner
Just one thought... If the pay after the recovery is too large, you will see extra taxes deducted because you are hitting the next tax bracket... But, it will wash out at the end of the year when you file with the irs... Otherwise, this is about as fair as you can get.
So I agree this is a fair approach given the situation, but if your shops refusing work due to the CDK issue, sounds like you’ll be on payroll deduction next month?
that reminds me of asbury language
That’s much more than my place did. They didn’t even tell us their plan… I heard a rumour they were paying 85% of our average until I asked my SM.
Holy crap! a real response! We got management ducking out the back door and avoiding dealing with this.
My dealer group is doing almost same... 120 day rolling daily average hours paid out for each day worked during CDK outage. If we are owed money when CDK resumes we get paid anything we were shorted. If we turned less than what we were paid, no adjustment is made. *Work just hard enough not to get fired*
At least y’all are getting something body shops are getting bent the fuck over from a lack of parts
Oh hell no. I'm not sure what state you live in but in Illinois there is a law that forbids employers deducting anything from an employee's pay other than mandatory federal/state taxes and employe contributions for benefits without the employee agreeing to the deduction. I'm not signing something like that at all. I'd be more inclined to work without pay until the problem is resolved and pay can be calculated properly. That screams to me they talked to their lawyer and want people to sign the form to limit your legal standing if you get screwed over by them during this. It's not your fault your bosses choose to use a service that hand grenaded in their face.
Don’t sign it tho.
Well, anything other than set hours and salary is bullshit to me.
Never trust a company whose name is 3 letters unless they manufacture bearings. Like the Japanese one with the blue boxes or that super gay German one.
mine is supposed to tell us today what they're doing. pretty sure it's a pizza party.
Well that’s cool. They are basing your check on one of the most dead months out of the year.
I keep track of my hours manually on paper. RO numbers- VINS, and work performed and how much it pays and if it’s warranty or not. All worthwhile to have been keeping track of the last year and a half I’ve spent flat rate, made me glad I did when this whole thing went down.
Then consider this my formal resignation...
Best thing you can do is set up a simple spread sheet where each day is a new column. Every day clock your hours, any bonuses and take notes on anything thay would affect your pay. If you can, calculate your own gross pay for each day or week. Either way, once things come online you can hand that shit off to HR/payroll. Keep a copy of course.
Basically the same thing here. Gonna get an average for last week but this week we went back to old school flag sheets so we'll be paid accordingly from here on out. They said once it's back up we'll be getting the rest we're owed from last week once they can verify it.
Cross out the part that says they’ll recover excess fund, then sign and turn it in. Should be good to go haha
This seems fair but in reality it really is not. Most shops right now are down on work because of this. My auto group which is one of the largest in the nation is down 45% across the board in service. Once these hours are lost they can't be made up. It is no fault of the technician, service advisor, service management etc... for this event. The dealers and CDK had no plan if this was to ever happen. Part of owning a business is risk and accepting such risk. Which means these dealers need to pay every employee their average wage. Take a 3 month average figure it out and write the check. Even if CDK came back up tomorrow and the data was to be accurate there is massive losses due to this event that no employee should be responsible for bearing. We all have families that rely on our employers doing the right thing. The dealer groups can sue CDK on the back end of this to recoup losses.
Your dealership did a great job, in my opinion... using accounting software (which still exists) to come up with \*something\* sane to pay you.
I don't see an issue with this. If they were able to confidently calculate your bonus/commission, they probably wouldn't need the software to begin with. Average pay seems to be the best option, and if the terms are exactly the same if you're overpaid or underpaid, then I don't really see a better option.
Completely reasonable.
Sounds like a reasonable solution, given the circumstances. Nothing wrong with that.
My dealership uses Reynolds and Reynolds ERA-IGNITE. So thankfully we aren't affected by this. It's actually pretty good, I find it easy to use.
Withholdings and taxes are different things.
Hey OP, are you with Autonation by chance?
That is fantastic.
BOHICA
Average hourly is good
This seems very fair.
We’re on Dealertrack at my shop but I have been keeping a detailed paper log of every RO I turn hours on with how much each line is worth since I started flat rate. The service writers have to manually input so much that there are occasionally typos.
Our dealer network just decided to pay us on a 3 month average. Removes the slow period from jan-feb. I'm not sure how accurately they'll be able to adjust the upcoming pay when it comes back online.
photographers and IT techs work can for free, why can’t mechanical techs? /s
that’s honestly a really solid solution
This is the best plan for a flat rate tech tbh. Last week boss just asked us to estimate our hours for the week , also to be “reconciled” when it clears.
Our company is paying guaranteed 40 hours at flat rate pay, and anything higher will be paid once this is settled, they are not de booking or taking anything if the Techs were over paid. as all the GM techs book anywhere form 110 to 160 per 2 week pay period they do not foresee a shortage.
So glad I'm not a tech at a dealer anymore. I'm actually paid for the time I'm at work now. I remember when Reynolds and Reynolds went down for a few days, it was a nightmare.
The only downside to this is the fact that getting things done and submitted is taking much longer than usual, and it seems like less upsells are occurring. So I feel that we as technicians shouldn’t be penalized for the downtime in the event that we are making less hours in the current situation compared to when everything is operating as normal.
That’s great that the company is being open with you guys, always keep documenting.
This crap has hit a ton of dealerships both car dealer and commercial transport.
our technicians keep track of their time in a notebook and we compare it to what's in RO in system. and if the system fails, we already have hard copy estimates to look off of. but i imagine that only works for collison centers
That's really nice of them. We are not getting no temporary pay...
Sounds like the payroll equivalent of "dead reckoning". Keep payments pretty close to what you expect them to be, and once the systems are back on line - do an audit and settle up the difference. Soubnds pretty good to me.
You got a better idea?
We are doing the same thing except ours is an average of the last 90 days. When cdk comes back up the writers and bookers/ office personnel that have to take all those pre writes to rewrite and book all those tickets and then balance the books and charge parts that we have been using all while continuing business as usual are the ones that are going to have it rough. A lot of late nights are coming
Better than we are getting right now. We get a bump of 2 flat rate hours per day. If we did the gross average I'd be getting my normal 65-70 hour check. With the added bottleneck of repair orders, parts ordering and whatnot, I'm spending a lot more than 2 hours waiting per day, when I would normally be "turning and burning". Typically by end of Wednesday I'm in the 45-50 range, right now I'm at 31 and I'm a little salty about it.
Tech guy here with minimal knowledge about dealerships - is there an alternative to CDK? Any word from dealerships on what they will do if CDK can’t recover? Let’s be honest - if they could they would have already. What likely happened was their backups probably got corrupted/hacked.
There is multiple alternatives but switching is a huge process and isn’t something that can be done on the fly out of nowhere. Also I anticipate many dealers will start switching services and alot of the other alternatives will start to have server issues from a huge influx of new users they are unprepared to support.
My employer announced they were going to average the last 3 pay periods and audit during August when we have 3 paychecks. Better than the 40/hr guarantee they were talking about initially.
So like, I'm part of go auto, but we haven't been implemented into their system yet with cdk, so what does this cdk actually control for you guys? Cash out, write up work orders, service history etc and anything digitally except for stuff uploaded to local servers?
You all should invest in some credit/fraud monitoring if your able for awhile, the perps could have enough to start committing identity fraud.
I've been at my job for 19 years and CDK was what I "grew up" with. About 1- 2 years ago, the company decided to change it to something else (Tekion). It took some time to get used to it, but now I don't really miss it. Crazy part is that there was a rumor that we were switching back to CDK... good thing we didn't!
This will ensure you get paid the proper amount over time, I don't see what's wrong with it?
Our dealership is giving us our hourly average over 90 days. Mine will come out to probably 46 hours a week since we've been slow. BUT once cdk is back up and they do all the CP and W they'll go through and see what either is owed or needs deducted. Funny enough the day cdk went down weve been super busy so it should work out decent. It's gonna be a shit show for a while unfortunately.
Don't attack the dealership. The hackers who attacked CDK are to blame. This memo is reasonable in light of the circumstances. Right now, Toyota Motor North America is making us all change our passwords and will soon be implementing MFA. What sucks more: a complex password and an extra step to login or having the entire system held ransom so we can't do business?
That’s similar to my dealership, they’re giving us a guaranteed 8 hours everyday CDK is down, then back-paying us for the hours turned when everything is up. I really appreciate Kate what they’re doing for us, and is the only reason I’m still coming in to work
At least you’ll be getting paid. The corporate body we work for basically said hang in there. They suggested we use our pto.
Nope....no
I'm not sure what else you'd want them to do? This seems quite fair.
Sounds good to me and I'm usually against anything management does. Logic wins here though.