Proposal for changes to travel refund accounting process

Hello,

I am currently working on the accounting for July 2025, and I would like to make a proposal for changes to how we handle our travel refunds. What I note below is a repeating issue, which creates quite some administrative pain, so I would like to solve it.

First, I think we should put a time-limit in place for how long travel refunds can be sent. We need to have a proper understanding of our budget, and usually, expenses should have a proper receipt in time, so there rarely is a reason for asking belated. Sometimes we get refund requests that date back months, if not years, and this kind of dilutes the budgeting.

I sugges to only accept refund requests for eight weeks after they occured, and otherwise refuse payment. This should factor in vacations and longer absences, and even for an event that takes place late December, we would know the final numbers then before finalizing next year’s budget usually around FOSDEM.

Under specific conditons (e.g. someone falls sick for a long period of time) we can grant exceptions, but currently it seems to be more the rule than the exception, and this doesn’t work.

Second, I think we should find a better way to organize the files. Every so often we have a variety of files with different names, which makes grouping things for accounting much harder.

I would suggest we either adjust our travel tool to create standardized file names (e.g. Year - Month - Event - Name - Refund Type), or if that is not possible, ask people who request a refund to name files accordingly and refuse the request unless files are in proper order.

That is a little bit more work for everyone, but overall, could reduce the amount of work on travel refunds by quite a lot.

Thoughts welcome.

Florian

This is easily achievable via our tool. If I set the deadline to ask for a refund to 8 weeks, it will be impossible to file the request after this delay.

Can’t be achieved though TSP, but I can add it to the how-to request refund page on the wiki and roll back the request on TSP until files are named accordingly

Also, should be found a way to pay in advance to those who can’t afford the expense in first place.

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That is something which in general is not a problem. What we cannot do is to book for people, that makes things really complicated. It is no problem, however, to send a refund request already when you booked a hotel or flight, even if it is before the event. In case of cancellation, if you get refunded, you might have to refund TDF, but we can refund in advance.

What is a challenge is the various countries, banking systems and connected regulations. Sometimes sending money from A to B is not so easy, or adds delays, or high costs - something that often is out of TDF’s control.

I’m someone who has on occasion made the refund requests rather late. Typically, this is what happens:

  • I get accepted to give a talk at LibOCon.
  • I book a flight and send the details/invoice.
  • Months pass; I attend the conference, during which I am preoccupied with a million important things, none of which being reimbursements.
  • I get back from the conference with a lot on my mind.
  • More months pass; nothing triggers my memory to submit the refund request.
  • … Then at some point a few months later I remember I need to do that.

Of course that isn’t a very good reason for not requesting refunds earlier. But it’s bound to happen to some of us, some of the time.

I would not like for reimbursement to be missed because of absent-mindedness (for myself and for others, see above). But if:

  1. A person who reported their flight or railway travel details (incl. invoice with price), and does not file on time, will be considered to have filed a request for the invoices they have sent, only; and
  2. There were an automatic mechanism to remind people, already known to be eligible for refund, to submit the request - sending the notification some time in advance before the deadline, but some time after the conference has ended;

then I wouldn’t mind the deadline.

You mean, the files being submitted? Any of the two options you suggested is fine by me; I name a lot of my files with YYYY-MM-DD prefixes anyway. But note that if you ask people to use a standard file naming scheme, you will still probably need to tweak the travel tool to check the submitted file names and ensure they match the format; so - it might be worthwhile to just have the ‘travel tool’ name the files itself.

Thinking forward and more widely, I am wondering if we couldn’t share some administrative automation FOSS with other foundations/NGOs, rather than always rolling our own.

Hello Eyal,

conferences are stressful times indeed, and travel exhaustion does the rest, I can totally relate to that.

The thing is that the administrative overhead is becoming a nightmare in particular in these times, and it affects a few people (Sophie, Stephan and me in particular) massively, and my goal is to have all the community to help a bit to make things easier. We’re on the verge of burning out people, to be honest.

Sometimes we get requests dating back months, if not years. If people then also ask a per diem it turns into a nightmare (which food did we serve and have to deduct from the per diem in 2019?). And that’s not for TDF’s sake, it’s something that could be asked from a tax office, so we need to be prepared.

In your example, you could send the refund request already when you booked the flight, you don’t have the wait until after the conference. It makes things more complicated in one area, which is in case you cannot attend, get a partial refund for the flight, you need to pay that back to us, otherwise you’d be over-compensated.

For the deadline, this is nothing we can do manually. What we could look into is to fund such a feature for our travel support program so mails get sent automatically. I don’t know if this is possible, but worth to consider.

Sharing the burden with other FLOSS organizations is something that works only partially. Several I know are stretched thin themselves, and/or do things in a much smaller scale than TDF, so can’t really help. Others have more administrative roles, e.g. a unique person in charge of financials, another on charge of HR, which at TDF lies all within the same people. As another example, I know organizations who in general cut down the travel costs to 50% or 75%, or limit to an upper amount. TDF is more flexible in this regard. Also, certain topics directly lie within one organization and relate to accounting.

Some elements are also specific for TDF, e.g. the lack of one centralized office (which means if you give your travel receipts to a member of staff they then have to ship it themselves, as one example). I’ll explain our administration in general a bit later as well.

Florian

The only thing is that we need to have received the documents in Berlin to be able to process the refund. Otherwise, SPI is another solution.
Sophie