Tired of being on salary but having to clock in 40 hours a week.
I could use some advice or maybe just a place to vent. I, 31F, have been working for my employer for 9 years. We actually worked together prior to that but both needed to leave our employer and she wanted to go off and create her own business and brought me along. So we essentially built the business from the ground up. We are a small bookkeeping company that helps various businesses with their bookkeeping.
I've really enjoyed my job and have got myself into a "Senior Management" position currently making 62K/year (I started at 48K/year). We have two other individuals that work part time doing the data entry and then I do financial review of that as well as I have a few of my own clients I strictly work on doing various things. In the beginning of the business she was pretty lenient on the vacation policy just because we didn't really start out with any clients and it was just me working for her so if I didn't have any work and left for the day early she wouldn't dock my PTO for it. She actually started me accruing 3 weeks of vacation then when we started hiring 5 years in she was working on their vacation policy and noticed she didn't want that happening for everyone and it was in my employment agreement that it was supposed be 2 weeks so she talked to me about it and changed it to accrue 80 hours and took away 20 hours from my balance with my Okay. (I know I know, I should've said no cause it was her fuck up). Anyway at that time I wasn't really using PTO so I had a pretty hefty balance.
Fast forward to now. I moved about 2 hours away two years ago and I'm appreciative she's been able to make it work to let me do this. She also pays rent for a little office space I have here so I can get out of the house and work. I've been taking more vacations since meeting my boyfriend 4 years ago and I feel like just enjoying my life more. He has some flexibility with his work so sometimes he'll have last minute leave town to do something and asks if I want to come and I unfortunately say I can't. Even though I probably can make it work. My issue is that over the last couple years my boss has gotten pretty strict on the 40 hours a week deal. If I don't log 40 hours then she docs the remaining to my PTO which is fair but my workload is slim sometimes that I don't need to be clocked in 40 hours.
I'm struggling with the fact that I can get my work done in say 4 hours sometimes compared to a full 8 hours. We bill our time to clients so we use a time tracking software and if we aren't working on something billable we put it to "Admin" which I hate doing. I'm currently -10 hours PTO and only accrue 3.33 every paycheck plus whatever hours I work overtime in the payperiod weeks. I don't feel like I'm ever going to get out of PTO Debt because of the low workload and I'm just at a point where I don't care anymore about working for this company so my motivation is at an all time low!! The pay is barely helping me. She's a small business herself but I'm the highest paid employee and I'm barely making enough to cover bills every month!
I've been really toying around with the idea of going off and starting my own business for years because I just haven't enjoyed working for this company. I know I'll have to put in time and money into it but I want the flexibility and not feeling like I have to meet the 40 hour work week requirement and being punished for it. Am I right for feeling this way?