Every expense related to the Fedora Project's budget must have a receipt. Receipts are the key to getting reimbursed for your costs. Get receipts for everything, and keep them in a safe place so you can either give or transmit them to the budget managers for reimbursement. Please do not mix up private and Fedora items in one receipt. No receipt means no reimbursement. This is non-negotiable, sorry!
Budget Request and Reimbursement Guidelines
All budget requests over $2000 need to be approved by FAmSCo. Regions deal with requests up to $2000 and each one has its own guidelines and rules for budget requests and reimbursements:
- APAC (Asia and Pacific)
- EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
- LATAM (Latin America)
- NA (North America)
Travel expenses
Timing
Do not wait until the last minute to make travel reservations. Room blocks for conferences sell out. The block may expire, and you'll have to pay a higher rate. Flight prices go up. The earlier you can plan for travel, the better. The "sweet spot" for the lowest prices booking flights is generally a Tuesday or Wednesday three weeks in advance of your departure.
Hotels
Hotels generally require a credit card to make a reservation but do not charge it. (They may put a hold on it if it is a debit card. If this is a concern, check with the hotel to be sure.) Please make your own reservation if at all possible. Once you're at the event, you can have someone with a Red Hat card, preferably from the OSAS team (as this is the cost center for Fedora's budget) put your room on their card. You won't be charged and won't have to file for reimbursement.
Critical: If you have someone else put your room on their card, you must promptly give that person the receipt for your room. Otherwise you will be putting that person in the situation of not getting reimbursed by Red Hat.
Flights
If at all possible, it is preferable to book your flight yourself. We trust you to choose the least expensive option. When someone else books your flight for you, there is a risk--a large one for those outside of the US--that it will be flagged as fraudulent and your flight cancelled. That means that your flight will have to be rebooked, possibly at a higher cost, and at the expense of twice the time for the person who booked it for you.
If that is not at all possible, you can have someone book your flight for you. But because of the time involved with the process, it is highly preferable that you book your own flight.
Non-travel expenses
Having others pay for you
You can avoid being a middleman by having certain other people pay bills directly. We have several community members who have Red Hat credit cards for this purpose:
- APAC: Izhar Ismail
- NA: Andrew Ward (NA)
- EMEA: Joerg Simon (EMEA)
- LATAM: Neville Cross (LATAM)
See our community credit card process page for more information.
Paying for things yourself
In order to be reimbursed for Fedora-related expenses that you pay out of your own pocket, you must be able to be reimbursed via PayPal. Please see your region above for more information on how to make these requests. We will not reimburse expenses via any other method unless agreed before the expense is incurred.
In the past, we could reimburse people in cash and have them sign a receipt. This reimbursement method has been eliminated, because it is too dependent upon people being in the same physical location and it does not scale.
Fedora generally does not pay for personalized items such as business cards. Exceptions may be granted per region.
Documentation
Every expense related to Fedora must have a receipt. No exceptions.
Your Fedora wiki user page must be updated with information about yourself, what you do in Fedora, etc. This is necessary because it allows financial auditors to give a "+1" to the expenses, because they can see the connection to Fedora.
Deadlines
Expenses must be submitted within two weeks of being incurred. If you submit outside of this time frame, you may not be reimbursed. If you submit out of quarter, you will almost certainly not be reimbursed.
Red Hat's fiscal quarters run Mar-May, June-Aug, Sept-Nov, Dec-Feb. Obviously, if you have an expense the last few days of May, you still have the two weeks to file; it will simply be charged to the June-Aug quarter instead. However, if you have an expense in April and don't submit until June, there's a good chance your request will be denied for being out of quarter. Please file expenses in a timely manner.
Submitting your request
These are a few things that have caused problems in the past. Please read through these tips to make sure that your reimbursement is processed as quickly as possible.
- Reimbursements and flight requests should go through the relevant trac. Receipts and Paypal addresses should be in the ticket. Do not write "I emailed it" in the ticket and hope that that is enough. Your reimbursement will be delayed.
- Do not save up a large number of receipts for an event (such as FUDCon) and submit them at the end. Please submit expenses as they are incurred.
- Receipts must be in PDF format. It is much easier if all of your receipts are attached as a single PDF. For example, if you have a plane ticket and a bus ticket in one reimbursement, attach a PDF with both receipts.
- Credit card statements do not count as receipts.
- Don't forget to list your Paypal address in the trac ticket.