PAYG Support

Onega can provide support in a couple of different models. Many clients choose to take fully managed support, but we also provide Pay As You Go (time as billed) support for clients who only require reactive support on an ad-hoc basis.

Some Notes on How PAYG Support & Travel Time & Expenses Work:

Under PAYG Support, we charge for our time and expenses under a professional services model in helping you with any IT issues that you have.

If we are helping over the phone or remotely, then this will be just the time that we spend actively working on your issue or ticket.

If we need to come out onsite, our policy is that we charge for travel time and expenses for travel during the day. In line with standard practices, the first and last trip of the day - which would represent a 'normal commute' would not be chargeable thus. So if we are onsite for a day with you for support, as long as you are within roughly an hour's distance from Onega's offices in Docklands, then you'd not be charged for any travel time. As a rule of thumb, anywhere inside the M25 would generally be regarded as being part of a 'normal commute'.

We try to be fair on these things, and hopefully this strikes a good balance that is fair for all. If we are for example leaving job 1 and going to job 2 then we'd generally split the travel cost fairly so that no one is dis-advantaged.

As another example - if we come onsite for half a day starting at an office at say 9am (or time as agreed), then we would not charge for the normal commute in, but would charge for the journey back if during the day (or split onto next site etc.). By way of background, the reason for this is to be fair and strike a happy and logical balance for all. We had a period where we had many callouts for very small pieces of work - eg a mouse or keyboard swap which takes less than 5 minutes. If we don't account for travel time then we might do three or four small jobs a day with most of the time unbilled traveling otherwise. Thus there is a natural link between time and cost for all so common sense can prevail.

For support time, we only charge for reasonable and efficient time to do a job, ie if part of the time requires an Onega engineer to need to research a process that might be new to them, then we'd only charge for the 'efficient time' to do the task and not the learning time prior to that.

At the end of a month we collate our timesheets and run through them to make sure that billing is reasonable in context of work and will make adjustments so that time billed is fair and reasonable in the context and interests of good working relationships between both parties. Effectively we ask ourselves 'if I was a manager at company X and presented with these timesheets and invoices, would we think them fair and reasonable (and hopefully brilliant value etc.).

If you ever have any queries or anything is unclear please do call your account contact at Onega and we'll be able to run through these to resolve to them.

Time and Overtime:

We charge a standard hourly rate for our engineering / support time for work on adhoc (PAYG) support and for work not covered by a fixed price managed services agreement with a client. We work to a standard 8 hour working day, and work beyond this time or out of normal working hours would be regarded as overtime. We don't charge clients for break and lunch (meal break) times of course.

Work at weekends and on public (bank) holidays is also charged at a higher than standard rate to reflect the work that colleagues are doing in unsociable days / hours.