Expense Reporting Requirements

Basic Rules

All expense reports must be submitted via the Organization's expense reporting platform, within the following constraints:

1. Receipts are required for any purchase over $20 that's reimbursed at-cost (no receipts are required for per-diem reimbursement, or reimbursement for mileage). 
2. All expenses must be tagged with the most appropriate tag available.
3. The business purpose of the trip must be clear from your expense line item or report name. 
4. You must normally submit expenses for reimbursement within 10 days of the end of each quarter, for any expenses incurred in that quarter.  However, you may choose to consider expenses for a specific event as incurred on the date of the event instead of the date you paid the expense (e.g. if you bought a flight in March for a training in April, you may consider the expense incurred in April).  Expenses submitted after this cut-off are not eligible for reimbursement, unless a special exception is given per the rules in the section below.
5. If paying for expenses with a payment method that gives you a personal benefit (e.g. a credit card with a point system or cash back), you must align with the rules and limits in this policy.

Client-Billable Expenses

For expenses billable to clients, you must also:

• include the client name in the name of the expense report, along with your name or initials.
• tag all expenses as "Client Billable".
• submit all expenses on a report exactly as they will be passed through to that client, with any needed adjustments, splits, or pro-rations already factored in, and any needed explanations or supporting detail already included in the report, so that the expense report can be passed along to the client without further edits and with the total matching what we will invoice to the client.

What To Do If You Screw Up

If you've violated an expense reporting requirement (e.g. missed a deadline), the expense may (or may not) still be approved for reimbursement, depending on the specifics of the situation. You may request an exception to the usual policy after-the-fact if you are facing rare extenuating circumstances, or if you just made a mistake and are still working to improve your understanding of and compliance with expense policies.  If it's extenuating circumstances at play, simply explain them when you submit your expenses. If it's just a mistake, choose and take one concrete action to improve your compliance with expense policies in the future, and share what it is when you submit your expenses - the action can be anything you think will help, and it can be small (better small and easily doable vs. big and easily procrastinate-able).  In either case, exceptions may only be granted for hard costs with receipts; exceptions are never permitted for per-diem claims more than one month past-due.