Guideline: How to apply for a budget from the Neos Project (draft)

The Neos Project Finances & Fundraising
1

Hey everyone,

with our own legal entity well underway Gina and I started to prepare some helpful information on how to apply for a budget to spend for Neos.

This is a guideline, so there always will be situations where the guideline still will leave questions open.
As long as:

We validate the guideline from time to time and
We are aware that as long as it helps us in 80% of the situations, all is fine.
The rest are exceptions and can be tackled individually.

Preamble: The Neos team reviews and approves budget requests, not the Neos Foundation CIC. Our legal entity acts as a custodian of our money and is bound - as far as legally permitted - to the Neos team decisions on how to spend it.

Who can request a budget?

Anyone in the Neos community.

How is a budget requested?

1) Start a discussion thread in this category with the basic information about your budget request, to get some input from other community members:

  • What do you want to spend money on?
  • How much money do you want to spend?
  • Who would be the budget owner?
  • In what timeframe do you want to spend the money?

It is good practice to check the list of approved budgets to avoid duplication.

2) When your idea had the chance to be discussed within the community you can open a vote about your budget request.

3) After the poll:

If your budget request was approved:

  • Awesome! Perform the work/travel etc. you planned to achieve your goals
  • The budget owner is responsible that their budget is spent for its actual purpose and in Neos’ best interest
  • The budget owner is accountable to the Neos Team

If your budget request was declined:

  • You have probably received a lot of helpful feedback which you can incorporate into your next idea!

4) When work/travel is done

  • the budget owner monitors their budget and closes it when it is depleted or the time to submit reimbursements has ended
  • the budget owner reviews and approves/declines any reimbursement requests and
  • forwards approved reimbursement requests to the Neos accounting guild (tbd). See exception below if the budget owner is not a Neos team member!

Tips for Budget Owners

Important: If you are not a Neos team member, send approved invoices & reimbursements to a Neos Foundation CIC director. As a company we need to follow compliance guidelines to prevent fraud and thus a company official needs to be involved in the payout process.

  • Budgets should be requested and approved before any work, travel etc. happened
  • You are responsible to review and approve/decline reimbursement requests against your budget (e.g. travel costs).
  • You must not approve reimbursements that exceed your approved budget.
  • As the Neos Foundation CIC will payout the money, we require formally correct VAT invoices or our WIP: reimbursement form.

Where to get help?

If you would like help in setting up a budget request, the easiest place to ask is the Lounge channel in our Slack.

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2

i would like to change this to: AND our WIP: reimbursement form, as a cover page.

background is overview. wherever we store the invoices, forms and receipts afterwards it needs to give overview easily to everybody. also to everybody who wants to check. i want the CIC to be very transparent. so if we have the same form for every reimbursement, then overview is easy. remember: a reimbursement migth be summarized - then it contains several receipts, or maybe one invoice and one or several receipts, maybe in some cases only one invoice. if we agree that there is ALWAYS the form, all is easy and we simply attach everything as one pdf and the first page is the form. so we know that whatever receipt we find ONLY the form counts. thus all movements on the bank account have to be found on a form and every form must have a regarding bank account entry.

so: no reimbursement without form.

i imagine a drive where all reimbursements can be found. each is ONE pdf with a form cover page and a single-identifier-file-name.
and we have bank transfers which also everybody can check - where each reimbursement done, is listed with the regarding single-identifier-file-name.
everybody could check everything at any time…

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