Hi,
Not sure where’s more appropriate - here or Participation.
One thing that crosses my mind whenever I have to handle any sort of expense as a contributor at Mozilla is how horribly inefficient and systematically peculiar the process is. Now, @couci does an absolutely incredible job at holding it all together as much as possible (massive credit to her for that), but we seem to be outgrowing the way it currently works.
Particularly outside of the US it’s problematic. PayPal is slow, and by the time money gets to me, currency has changed, or in some cases, I’ve even completely forgotten that I’m waiting for an expense reimbursement.
But before that, there’s the whole issue of actually filing an expense. Needinfos and flags work great for code reviews, but the whole system feels very hacky for finances. Receipts go through as attachments, which insist to me that they are patches, and are hard to read through and process.
We should also at some point consider the differences between expensing and purchase orders. There is absolutely no reason why a contributor should have to use an expense process for things that they are paying for in advance.
To me, the tooling and understanding of what “expense” means seems to be the issue here, and I do wonder if others have a similar experience.
The process should be seamless; expenses are not a core function, they are a support function that runs alongside the core. Right now, expense management holds in the line as part of the core function of how anything I do involving money works.
I’d propose we consider looking into breaking this system down a little bit, and reconsidering the two functions of the current budget request system.
- Purchasing
- Travel/Personal Company Expenses
Purchasing (for pre-booked travel, stands at events, venues, etc) should fluid and easy. Quote filed, approved, invoiced from supplier, payed centrally. This works so much better than the current system which looks like this:
-> Quote filed
-> Approved
-> Community member invoiced in their name (this is a massive issue)
-> Money sent by paypal, using estimates on fees/currencies etc
-> Contributor pays venue (again, in their name)
Expenses should work similarly to how they already work, without the manual PayPal processing (except where needed). Would it make sense to issue reps/contributors who file more than two expenses per year with a prepaid card, where when they file their request, the card is deposited with enough funds to cover their expenses (+ over budget allowance), and then we clear remaining funds when all items are paid for. This would also provide a simple way to track spending where receipts are lost etc.
Of course, I am talking from a standpoint in a country where we have solid financial technologies, so there are likely considerations in other countries to make looking at this, but my point is this:
The slow, tedious, and painful budget system makes it unviable for me to want to be involved in local events and other things at Mozilla that cost me money, but very little. It’s also a frustrating process that takes away a lot of my spare time, that I could be using for actual contributions.
Tom
