Expenses

Free stuff for employees

See the docs on allowances for what employees can expense to the co-op as a policy.

Once-off expenses

Small expenses up to £50 don’t need approval if you are a member. Non-members or freelancers should ask a member, but we tend towards yes if it is reasonable.

Anything above £50 needs to go through a proposal process with the rest of the co-op. Anything that is a recurring expense is almost certainly in this category, as most will go over £50 in a couple of months.

Recurring expenses

All recurring expenses need to go through a proposal process. This can either happen in a meeting through sociocracy, or through a thread in the Proposals channel on Twist.

Our preference is for recurring expenses to be charged directly to collaborators rather than having to switch our card out at a later date. This is for a few reasons:

• We tend to forget about them and they add up over time - this causes an embarrassing conversation to ask them to pay us back.
• It can be time-consuming to track past collaborators down and get them to switch the card (e.g. some have taken 9 months)

If you must charge a recurring expense to the card, please add it to the Recurring Expenses spreadsheet and ideally the Cashflow Model too so we can keep track.

Saving documentation

If you charge an expense to the card, please save the PDF invoice to the Project folder and also attach it to the transaction in Xero.

The reasons for this are:

• We need to regularly reconcile expenses with the correct VAT amount.
• The accountants need to see documentation when we’re doing the quarterly VAT return and annual corporation tax accounts.
• If the receipts aren’t saved anywhere, whoever is managing finances needs to go hunting through old emails (very difficult) or account logins in order to find receipts.

When you’re reconciling the transaction, please make sure the VAT rate is correct, there’s a description of the reason for the charge and it has been “Assigned to a customer”.

If it is unclear how to do this, please ask the person currently stewarding Financial Administration, or failing that, someone who has stewarded Financial Administration in the past.