Chapter 71 - Special Expense

Pei Qian suddenly thought of something else. “Wait, I got another idea. I’ll give every employee an expense limit; they could spend a certain amount of office supplies and necessities within one cycle. As for the exact sum… en…”

“One cycle every three months, every employee can get an expense limit of 3500 yuan.”

Pei Qian actually wasn’t considering this; he was testing the system.

If the cycle was shorter than three months and the expense amount was more than three thousand five hundred, the system would not allow it.

Xin Hailu found this slightly obscure, “Boss Pei, currently, we do not set a limit for expenses for reimbursement for our employees. Including overtime taxi fees, business trips, etc; they were all reimbursed fully. What specifically was this three thousand five hundred referring to…?”

Pei Qian explained, “This is called a special expense. This money can be freely used to purchase anything related to work.

“For example, doesn’t Bao Xu like games? This money could be used to buy some cards or equipment.

“Or perhaps some employee already has a pair of decent earphones; however, if he feels that a better pair of earphones could allow him to hear the game sound quality better and would be beneficial for game development, he could use this sum of money to buy gaming earphones.”

Xin Hailu nodded and said, “I understand now, Boss Pei.”

Pei Qian also realized this recently.

Although some things might all be considered expenses, the system had a different tolerance for different things.

The original expenses reimbursement had been a uniform decision for all employees. For example, everyone could claim their taxi fares in full for overtime; that was the same for all. As for a work computer, everyone had a mechanical keyboard and dual-view monitors, etc; they all were adequately equipped.

However, for some special requests, the system would not recognize them. For example, Bao Xu said he needed to charge money to experience a certain game and its gameplay.

The system would not allow this amount to be claimed.

Or if Huang Sibo said that he wanted a two-thousand yuan mechanical keyboard or a three-thousand yuan gaming earphones that would help him in experiencing the games he was developing; was that allowed?

The system would not approve of that. These slightly far-fetched reasons were originally not accepted by the system. The system had a different benchmark for what everyone ‘needed’ in order to complete their work.

Pei Qian’s standards as a boss were very high; even buying a high-class suit had been approved. This was probably a special privilege of an owner or a boss. As for restrictions, the owner as a boss could not give himself a salary.

For other employees, they could only claim what was necessary for their work.

This was very reasonable. If the system allowed expenses claims for ‘charging money to a game’ or ‘high-tech earphones to better experience gameplay’, Pei Qian could easily result in losses for the System Funds just by asking all his employees to play domestically-produced games with paywalls and throw money in the game.

The system naturally wasn’t stupid.

However, Pei Qian had deftly circumvented its restrictions. He realized that the system actually had a certain tolerance for ‘non-necessary expenses’. The premise was it could not be unlimited and a limit had to be set. Hence, by giving everyone a fixed limit, they could then openly spend the System Funds in the name of their company and work!

Pei Qian counted using his fingers.

By the looks of it—based on this ‘special expense’ component, he could actually increase overhead by another thirty to forty thousand yuan! What’s more, these monies would not interfere with production; this was strictly a company benefit given to employees according to its rules!

That meant that the settlement date would not be pushed back!

Pei Qian couldn’t help it as he was internally very happy; he praised himself for being a genius!

…

…

Office…

Recently, the entire office had been immersed in a sort of crazed joy.

The design team was almost daily refreshing the gaming statistics as they saw Ocean Stronghold gaining in popularity; it had already superseded Bullet Hole! Although everyone couldn’t see the exact statistics for Bullet Hole—from the official games platform and the follow-up recommendations, Bullet Hole was suffering badly this time.

It was doing worse by the day!

Although Bullet Hole’s charging format was more reasonable than Ocean Stronghold, that did not have any impact at all.

For a game to make money, it did not depend on its charging format; it focused on the number of gamers! Even if one’s charging format was the most reasonable—if gamers fled and stopped playing, what use was that?

Ocean Stronghold’s quality beat Bullet Hole’s hands down. Hence, the former had exerted all sorts of pressure and had slowly poached the gamers from Bullet Hole! As the players spent less and the Ocean Stronghold earned more, the only one who suffered was Bullet Hole.

Huang Sibo sighed exhilaratingly; Boss Pei really had the foresight and was unfathomable!

Perhaps when he had successfully completed his study with Sun Strike Studios, he had already predicted this would happen?

He had purposely announced Ocean Stronghold at the same time as Bullet Hole, so that the latter would be publicity for the former and Ocean Stronghold could ride on Bullet Hole’s coattail?

This was such a harsh move; it had crushed Bullet Hole!

Actually, everyone was very curious about what it was like over at Sun Strike Studios now. However, no one dared to ask. To ask now would easily be seen as boasting and showing off; hatred would brew, and enemies would be formed on the spot.

However, thinking from another perspective—even if they didn’t ask, the amount of hatred Sun Strike Studios would have for them would already be rather huge.

Forget it, forget it. Since money had been earned, no point thinking about all these.

Huang Sibo was just thinking about this when his phone buzzed.

He looked at it, and it was a message regarding his salary!

“…what? Why is it so much?”

A huge question mark formed over Huang Sibo!

He actually hadn’t worked overtime this month, and by right, he shouldn’t have earned so much in overtime.

However, taking a closer look, the figure nearly scared him witless!

His base salary had been four thousand yuan; after a sixty-percent increase, it was six thousand four hundred now!

As the project bonus was fifteen percent of Ocean Stronghold’s profits, it was around a hundred and thirty thousand yuan for two weeks. As the project’s chief planner, Huang Sibo took slightly more than the rest; that was around eight thousand yuan.

As such, his salary for this month had reached fifteen thousand yuan!

Of course, he still had to deduct housing and insurance, as well as taxes. Even so, for his monthly salary for the Year 2010 to be more than ten thousand yuan; that was something he could comfortably go out and boast about!

Furthermore, as Ocean Stronghold became more and more popular and the revenue from the game increased, Huang Sibo’s bonus would grow as well. If he calculated this way, his pay for the next month could only get higher!

The project he was responsible for had done well while Boss Pei had been generous in giving out bonuses.

That was a double blessing and joy!

However, this was not all.

Xin Hailu entered the office and started to give out shopping gift cards. Everyone had a faint-golden shopping gift card; it had the symbol of Jinzhou City’s largest shopping complex on it. After distributing to all, Xin Hailu came to the middle of the office workspace, smiled slightly, and spoke.

“Don’t lose this gift card in your hands; a thousand yuan would be credited to them every month; you can go to the shopping complex and purchase some daily necessities.”

“Besides that, from today, Boss Pei has created a new ‘special expenses’ system. Every quarter, the company will reimburse up to 3500 yuan for these special expenses. What is included is as follows…”

Assistant Xin simply explained what the ‘special expenses’ were all about as well as its restrictions. For example… charging up to play a game was counted as well.

Everyone heard her speak and was stunned, especially Bao Xu. They were all baffled.

Such a good thing existed?

Didn’t that mean that from now on—whenever Bao Xu played games, he didn’t have to top-up using his own money anymore?