Case Study : To Charge or Not To Charge

CASE SCENARIO: sister (or brother, whichever you prefer) companies under the same flagship company. One is finance related, one is software development. Finance company encounters a small data entry problem and asks help from the software company to make small data corrections in the backend (database) level against a single transaction done against the system created by the software company. Despite the basic transaction, no existing function in the system is included by the software company to make this type of correction.

Finance company is unsure about exactly which tables in the database should be touched to fix this correction. The existing documentation does not give any indication of the dataflow in the system, enough to fix the issue. Finance company asks help from software company for suggestion and advice. Software company complies, and say they will look into the problem.

After a day, software company assesses that the correction will need to go through Quality Assurance procedures. It will take them more than 2 weeks to assess the changes that will be applied to one single transaction in the system.

From the finance point of view, it is a single transaction that comparatively, to all other major processes in the system, is simple. It can be classified as a basic transaction and therefore should take less than a week to address.

Therefore, this puzzling assessment given by the software company extremely confuses the finance company. But since they are looking for the software company's help, agrees on the assessment.

After a few hours, the software company comments that this is considered a charged item on the finance company's accounts.

CASE ASSESSMENT:
1. Software company has the right to charge sister finance company, regardless of severity level of the problem. This occurs as a procedure to streamline organization and cleanly separate the assets and profit earning capacity of both companies, despite the fact that both are under the same umbrella of companies.
2. Software company has the right to take the necessary duration and procedures to QA any changes made against the system, regardless of the severity level of the issue, to ensure smooth function and error free changes and deliver quality system to its customers.

CONCLUSION: Software company has every right to deliver the changes in more than 2 weeks time and charge the sister finance company for its services.

REALITY OF THE SITUATION:
1. Finance company is housing the support services of the software company. This includes email servers, testing sites and bug report databases. The finance company is sharing its resource to the software company.
2. There are no clear documentation given by the software company to the finance company to be able to correctly handle the system. Due to this, the finance company is forced to inquire and seek consulatation and advice from the software company, and consequently, be charged for asking questions which the documentation lacks.

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT: These software company guys are crazy.