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). It is also the PLC's responsibility to make sure the project has adequate funds for whatever they are deciding to purchase.

Do not forget conflicts of interest when discussing paying people. Conversations about these should be made without the payee involved. That means if the person is a PLC member, a new email thread should be started without that person. Don't forget to include a Conservancy contact (either your representative or a lawyer that is helping with the contract).

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.)

There are several things that are common purchases so we have a little more detail about some of them below:

Shirts, stickers or other swag

There are two ways to handle swag;

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 accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org

For method two, we recommend you use a drop shipper (such as 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 accounts-payable@tix.sfconservancy.org

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:

Both of these options have documentation requirements - please see this document to find out which is better for your situation: Purchasing Hardware

If the cost of the hardware is too great that the purchaser can not wait to be reimbursed, Conservancy can purchase the equipment directly and have it shipped to the recipient rather than having them purchase it and submit receipts for reimbursement. However whether it is a Conservancy-owned purchase or a grant, the recipient must still agree to the relevant terms described above.

Vendors who do some kind of one time 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

Travel

All travel reimbursements must adhere to Conservancy policy, published here: Travel Policies. 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. 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.

If the travel cost is too large 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.

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.

Ongoing server or domain expenses

You let us know what kind of service you need; server space, domain name registration, email hosting, etc. Please see the page for preferred vendors: (link) 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.

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.)

Other

Please see the following pages for more detailed information on each subject: