Getting paid, and chasing what is owed

Two ways the money reaches you

This is the distinction everything else follows from, and it is worth establishing before you work the first job rather than after.

Either the department pays you — the customer pays the agency, and it comes to you through payroll the way your salary does — or the customer pays you directly. The first is simpler and slower. The second is faster when it works and entirely your problem when it does not.

Which one applies changes how the money is treated at tax time as well, which is covered on the 1099 page.

Why officers end up chasing money

Off-duty work is often booked casually. A phone call, a handshake, a job worked, an invoice sent sometime later. Weeks pass. Other jobs happen. By the time anyone notices a payment is missing, the details have gone soft: which night was it, how many hours, was that the one that ran late?

An officer who can say “the fourteenth, six to eleven, five hours, this rate, invoiced on the twentieth” gets paid. An officer who says “I think it was around the middle of last month” is negotiating from nowhere.

Write it down while you are standing there

The record that gets you paid is short and has to be made at the time:

• The date, and the hours you actually worked rather than the hours booked
• Who the job was for — the business, and the person who arranged it
• The rate agreed, and what the job comes to
• Whether it has been invoiced, and when
• Whether it has been paid
• The miles, if you drove your own vehicle

None of that is difficult on the night. All of it is guesswork three weeks later, which is exactly when it gets asked for.

Following up without making it awkward

Most missed payments are not disputes. They are an invoice that never reached the right desk, a bookkeeper who left, an approval sitting in someone's inbox. A short factual message naming the date, the hours and the amount usually settles it, and it works precisely because it is specific.

Where the department handles billing, the chase is internal — and the same specificity is what lets whoever runs it find your job among everyone else's.

Knowing what is outstanding

The number worth having is not what you earned this year. It is what you worked and have not been paid for. Officers who track off-duty work at all usually track the first and not the second, which is the one that costs them money.

Rates, invoicing, whether the department bills on your behalf and how long payment takes are all set locally. This page is about the record, which is the part that is yours either way.