handbook/spendingmoney.md

Spending Money

Project Leadership Committees (PLC's) make all financial decisions for their project. These decisions must be in line with the project mission (eg. no limos and fancy champagne.)

Decision Making

Who should be involved in which decisions? People should recuse themselves from conversations where the topic is paying them, reimbursing them or buying equipment for them. A recipient of project funds can make a request, but then the other PLC members should discuss whether or not to grant the request without the potential recipient. If the recipient is a PLC member, then a new email thread needs to be started with everyone else on the PLC plus at least one representative of Conservancy. The Conservancy representative could be either the Director of Community Operations or a Conservancy lawyer who is helping with the contract.

Who lets Conservancy know a decision has been made?

One person on your Project Leadership Committee (PLC) should be designated as the Conservancy liaison. Make sure you pick someone for this role who has the time to be responsive to email.

Reimbursements

All reimbursements require PLC approval. For a single reimbursement, the approval can be sent directly to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org along with the request for reimbursement and receipts. For multiple reimbursements, please create an approvals ticket noting who is to be reimbursed and for how much. (For regular expenses, such as monthly meetups, you may wish to budget an annual total that can be drawn on by the approved spenders throughout the year rather than trying to itemize expenses up front.)

Shirts, stickers or other swag -

There are two ways to handle swag; 1) buy swag and give it away to whoever you think will help promote the project, 2) buy swag and then sell it at reasonable mark-up to raise money for your project.

Method one is easy, let us know you're planning to buy swag and either let us pay for it or you can pay for it and submit your receipt for reimbursement, via the accounts-payable queue.

For method two, we recommend you use a drop shipper (Spreadshirt) that will automatically produce a report of your sales including how much the shirt and shipping cost and how much of the sale was a donation for your work. This helps us track the swag income and the cost of the swag separately which is something the IRS would very dearly like us to do.

If you need a type of swag that isn't offered on Spreadshirt or wish to do in person sales of some type, please get in touch with us via your PLC alias so we can help you set up the record-keeping requirements.

Booth materials

Similar to the swag section above, you can have us buy stickers, leaflets, giveaways, booth signage or other items or you can tell us what you're thinking about and then buy and submit your receipt for reimbursement, via the accounts-payable queue.

Group meals

They should be fairly reasonable. Be sure to record the names of attendees. A picture is nice too (we love pictures of our projects celebrating their hard work!) but is not required.

Hardware and other equipment for doing project work

First, you’ll want to discuss whether or not you all agree on spending money for this – without the person or people who will be receiving the equipment. You might want to approve an amount “plus or minus 10%”, since sometimes prices can change quickly.

Second, you need to decide whether to fund the purchase as a reimbursement or a grant. The ownership and tax implications are different. If the payment is a reimbursement, Conservancy will own the equipment, and the money will not be taxable income for the recipient. The opposite is true if the payment is made as a grant: the recipient will own the equipment, but the payment will be taxable income to them, and they will have to provide us with completed tax forms (W-9 or W-8BEN).

Once a decision has been reached, forward the approval to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org.

Receipts for approved equipment purchases should be sent to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org. If the purchase is a reimbursement, the recipient of the equipment must agree to the following terms:

(a) Clearly label the equipment that it is property of Software Freedom Conservancy, and put the email address hw@sfconservancy.org on it if you can.

(b) When the equipment arrives, send us the serial number.

(c) Some reasonable personal or academic use of the equipment of course is acceptable, but we need to be sure the equipment will be used primarily for contributions to the project. Once you have the serial number in hand, send us a statement like the one below, filling in the variables:

"I, YOUR_NAME, will be the primary user of the DESCRIBE_EQUIPMENT, SERIAL_NUMBER_IF_IT_HAS_ONE. I attest that the equipment will be primarily used to facilitate my volunteer contributions to the INSERT_PROJECT_NAME project."

(d) If the equipment ever becomes non-functional and/or you have plans to get rid of it in any way or give it to someone else (even if it's someone within your project), please get in touch with us before you do.

If the purchase is a grant, grantee must provide tax information and agree to terms similar to the following (this is a basic example; projects may have additional requirements):

1. Grantee will perform at least 35 hours of work on PROJECT with the equipment Grantee purchases with the grant funds.

2. After three months, or the performance of 35 hours of work on PROJECT, Grantee shall provide a brief grant report in reply to this email, including a list of work undertaken, and work completed during the month. When the work includes materials placed in a revision control repository, the grant report should include a list of all commits related to the work made to a publicly accessible revision control repository.

3. Grantee will not use the grant funds to intervene in any election, or support or oppose any political party or candidate for public office, or engage in any lobbying not permitted by IRC section 501(c)(3).

4. Grantee will not adopt, use or apply to register any trademarks that incorporate, are a play on, or are similar to PROJECT without the prior written consent of Conservancy.

5. Grantee represents that the equipment they are purchasing with the grant funds is not being paid for by any other person or entity.

6. Grantee acknowledges that no goods or services were provided to Conservancy in return for this grant.

7. Grantee agrees that it will maintain records pertaining to its use of the grant funds for at least two (2) years after they are spent. Grantee will provide Conservancy with reasonable access to review relevant records for the purpose of evaluating the expenditure of grant funds and ensuring compliance with the terms of the grant

Vendors who do some kind of work for you

Please let us know about any sort of situation where you’re going to be paying someone, e.g., design, recording, meeting facilitation, catering, event organizing, etc. In most cases we should have a signed contract with the provider describing the work to be done and the billing process before they begin. Send the relevant information to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org as soon as possible.

To receive payment, vendors will need to send an invoice to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org that describes the work, lists expenses and clearly lists the hours worked with the rate they are charging or describes an agreement to do a set amount of work in exchange for a lump sum. The invoice should also include their contact and payment information.

For ongoing contractor work, please also see (contractors section.)

Travel

All travel reimbursements must adhere to Conservancy policy, published at https://sfconservancy.org/projects/policies/conservancy-travel-policy.html. It is the responsibility of each traveler to familiarize themselves with and adhere to this policy.

Your project's leadership committee (PLC) must sign off on travel spending, and may place additional restrictions on what they will reimburse. Travelers who intend to seek travel reimbursement should contact the PLC as early as possible for their approval. Do not include the traveler in the email thread or on the ticket discussing whether or not to fund their travel: it's a conflict of interest. (link to COI section).

Once decided, the PLC should let Conservancy know that they've authorized travel by sending the name(s) and amount(s) authorized to approvals@tix.sfconservancy.org. It is preferable to send authorizations for all the people going to the same event in one approvals ticket; however, to avoid creating unnecessary administrative work, please only list the people who have confirmed they intend to travel to the event and request reimbursement.

Visas

Conservancy can write a letter of invitation or a sponsor letter for community members that are traveling to the US. The traveler must be coming to the US primarily for a project meeting or a conference relevant to project work. We will need the traveler's address, their relation to the project, travel dates and an approximate itinerary. For sponsor letters, we also need to know who their project host will be during their trip. (Note from Rosanne: this doesn’t seem to belong in the Reimbursements sections, but I’m not sure where to move it to.)

Expenses Conservancy Can Handle Directly

Ongoing server or domain expenses

You let us know what kind of service you need; server space, domain name registration, email hosting, etc. Providers Conservancy has accounts with include Gandi, Rackspace, AWS, and Google Cloud. If you prefer a different provider, we will have our lawyer review any agreement or terms of service. If the rates for the same level of service are going to change significantly, we will let you know and if we can, we'll recommend a more frugal alternative. In order to have Conservancy handle these payments automatically rather than having you pay them and request reimbursement, we will need access to the billing invoices, either by setting the account to send them automatically to accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org (preferred), or by giving Conservancy accounting staff login access to the account to retrieve the invoices manually.

Large travel expenses that the traveler cannot afford to wait to be reimbursed for

The PLC must agree to prepay the travel expenses and note that explicitly in the approvals ticket. The approvals ticket should include the traveler’s name and email address, dates and purpose of travel, and what/how much is approved for funding. The earlier you do this, the better. Travel is full of local oddities and early travel plans help overcome those oddities when they are still likely to be cheap or avoidable. If there is a hackday or a meeting planned before or after a large event, please let us know that too. We'll have the traveler send us their info (see the travel policy) along with the dates for the event or meeting, and book the flight and hotel for them. Travelers whose expenses are prepaid must still adhere to Conservancy’s travel policy, including submitting a report after travel is completed.

Computers or other significant equipment for people working on your project

See “Hardware and other equipment for doing project work” section above for the differences between Conservancy-owned equipment and equipment grants. Whether it is a Conservancy-owned purchase or a grant, the recipient must still agree to the relevant terms, but Conservancy can purchase the equipment directly and have it shipped to the recipient rather than having them purchase it and submit receipts for reimbursement.

Expenses associated with a venue contract. See the section on EVENTS for more detail.

Code-signing certs

Projects pick their official name and generate a CSR to send to Conservancy. You will also need to vote to confirm you are willing to spend the money that obtaining a code cert costs, somewhere between $150 and $450 (at the time of this writing.)

Preferred Infrastructure

These are the tools we prefer to use. Unless there is a significant unmet need, we really prefer to work with one of each type of vendor across all our projects. This helps us stay on top of changes in APIs, services and pricing. (BRETT)

• Ticket sales
• Gandi for domain registration
• Server space?