Doing personal tasks for boss and paying with own money

paddyrg

Polarbeary wrote: »

In banking there are many directors and MDs. The CEO is at the top and he's still accountable to the Board and Chairman.

Keeping on learning! . Ta

gunsandbanjos

This guys time is clearly very valuable to the company, so yes I think a personal assistant should assist in all tasks.

However they need to give the PAs a company card though for purchases relating to work as it's definitely not on to pay out your own pocket all the time.

duchy

I don't see any problem with doing his "housekeeping" tasks freeing him up to have more time to do the role the company expect of him -It's pretty common at a high level position. If I was paying someone £500K I'd far rather they delegated the tasks to a less expensive employee than wasted their time on them when they could be giving me better value for their huge salary.

Paying out of your own pocket is another matter.
Unless you have plenty of free available credit then it isn't acceptable - however if you do (and invoices are paid promptly enough to ensure you never pay charges) then as mentioned before make it work for you - by using a cashback creditcard, Quidco, Topcashback etc.

Alternatively find someone else to do his stuff when cover is needed -I'm sure you're not the only person in the company capable of the tasks.

cadon

You should absolutely have a corporate credit card to pay for any purchases he authorises you to make and deal with all the associated expense claims/paperwork yourself.

However, you don't sound like you want to be someone's assistant and I think you should look for a different line of work.

Polarbeary

His purchases are not related to work...

cadon

Polarbeary wrote: »

His purchases are not related to work...

You can generally put private expenditure on a corporate card provided it's later settled out of personal balances - i.e. out of his funds rather than yours.

Guest101

Polarbeary wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. If I was employed by him personally yes they would be part of my role. But I'm employed by the huge corporation -you will have heard of them and you may be one of its customers. I don't feel that it's an appropriate use of customer money to spend half my time doing personal chores that have nothing to do with work. My job is to assist him with admin tasks. I have no problem getting senior people a sandwich and coffee when they are back to back. But that's different than being expected to get a cab across the city to bring him back a fancy lunch he fancies. That's 40 minutes of my time when I could be doing actual work, the work stated in my job description.

My previous boss asked me to book some restaurants for him occasionally for non business use. He might ask me to pop to the bank for him very occasionally. He always apologised and said he knew he shouldn't be asking me to do that as the bank would take a very dim view of assistants being used to run personal errands. But he was nice and the tasks took a few minutes - not hours each day.

In the public sector, I wasn't even asked to get coffee and I imagine tax payers would not be happy knowing that their tax money is spent on personal errands. As an employee, I do not do personal errands on the job. I do them in my unpaid lunch break. Why is a senior manager any different?

Regarding the cash - I will not be paying with my own money. He's on half a million a year - I'm not.

His current EA works 24/7 for him. I leave work and leave it behind. I've never worked anywhere where even senior secretaries are meant to be responding to emails at 1am or on a weekend. Occasionally I'll stay late for urgent stuff but I'm not getting into that habit!

Personally I think your attitude stinks.

You're paid to assist and you seem to resent it

Undervalued

Polarbeary wrote: »

I'm asked to do personal tasks for him which take up half my time as well as doing my everyday work for the two managers I am already assistant too........

Am I the only person who jumped to the wrong conclusion here?

duchy

Undervalued wrote: »

Am I the only person who jumped to the wrong conclusion here?

Yes

Personally I think the OP needs to either accept this cover is something they are stuck with for five or six weeks a year when the real assistant is off .........or find a job that has more palatable year round duties........or refuse to do it and see whether they get fired or not. Nothing worse at work than someone with a resentful attitude. Clearly this company aren't such a good fit as their previous company -so maybe the OP might consider moving on either to another company or back to the old one. "We didn't" do this at my old company" rarely is appreciated.

Polarbeary

Guest101 wrote: »

Personally I think your attitude stinks.

You're paid to assist and you seem to resent it

I think you are pretty rude. I'm paid to assist with work tasks. Let's see what HR thinks eh?