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A Fair Telecommuting Budget?
homework asks: "Last night, I got a call from my boss asking me to define a budget for me to work from home. What items should I include in the figures so that I can show that the use of my home and my personal equipment can be compensated for fairly. Should I include my salary into the figures? Has any other Slashdot reader been in a similar situations and what was the outcome? Were you treated fairly?"
The IRS defines what things constitute a home office for the purpose of deducting those expenses from your income tax. That's a pretty good guide. For instance, you'll discover that a space which you use 100% for business purposes is easier to account for than a space which you use 20/80 or 50/50... so look at setting a small room aside as your office. Divide your budget into capital costs and recurring costs.
On the other hand, maybe all of that is overkill. Your actual cost of occasional telecommuting may be as simple as "enable an SSH and IPsec gateway on the corporate LAN, pay a monthly DSL/cable modem/frac-T1 fee".
Should I include my salary into the figures?
I really don't know why you're asking us that - ask your boss if he wants your salary in the numbers or not. Or better still, just use your initiative and give him the figure and explicitly state whether or not it includes your salary, based on $X K p.a.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Talk someone in finance (especially if it's a large company.) They will know the rules and will help you prepare something that will make a good impression on your boss.
I'd pay my company money to telecommute. Less gas, less wear and tear on the car, less lunches out, less clothing requirements, less stress from the commute (and office politics), ability to start cooking dinner early, etc. It'd save me $100/week easily.
Our few guys that work offsite generally bill us for their cable/DSL and a phone, landline or cell, for about $100/month. We don't pay for home office space and we don't pay for mobile WiFi connections (except for the executives). We provide the laptop and other machines and they can expense a few things here and there, like a switch or router or KVM, but everyone can do that.
It's really pretty simple, just don't try to "get away with something". Try to keep work and home things seperate as much as possible, for example, try to have a single room as a dedicated office. Try to have 1 machine that's dedicated to work, etc. For things that are shared between business and home (cost of your net connection for example), try to figgure out what percent of the time it's used for work and use that percent of the cost.
A lot of times it seems like people either try to cheat their company into paying for more stuff than they need to do their job, or for significantly better stuff than they need to do their job (if, say, you'll only be using SSH to talk to servers via command line, then there's no reason to try to get the company to pay for a bleeding edge machine when something a generation or two old will do just fine).
On the other hand, a lot of people let themselves be screwed by just eating the costs of things like a desk and chair, or a router (for some reason everyone manages to get at least part of their internet bill paid).
In the end, you probably won't get the company to pay for everything that you cite as a cost, but the difference might be made up wholly or partially just buy things like the money you save on commuting, the money you save on health care by not getting sick from stress from having to go into the office every day, etc.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Internet
Find out the full cost of the highest speed internet you can get - include the phone line or minimum legal cable rate (that is different than basic cable usually by $15-$20 per month). Get it in writing or an email from the cable or DSL company.
Phones
The question here is home phone or cell phone. If your company provides cells, then this issue is dead. If your company doesn't then find out what the 1500 minute per month or better plans cost and submit that for your budget.
If it's a home phone, Packet 8 and Vonage are great and give you business class features for $29-$39/month. Your boss will like unlimited long distance and the fact that you have real voice mail and the ability to handle multiple calls elegantly.
Fax
The question here is do you need to send them or just get them. If you are just getting them, your company's fax server or eFax is great. If you are sending, get a fax machine or multifunction device that can work without the computer being turned on.
Supplies
Ink cartridges are expensive. Figure out how much printing you will do and add 25% for crappy inkjet scammage (i.e cleaning mode & so on). Then calculate ink jet carts+$20/mo for supplies (pens, paper, etc...)
Up Front.
You might get $150 up front for furniture if you ask nice. You'll also need to buy a multifunction/fax machine ($150 for a good one), pay any set up fees for DSL/Cable, purchase a good router if you don't have one ($50).
So here's the deal:
-- $G
There's definitely an advantage to telecommuting. I've been doing it for about three years now and it's worked out pretty well. When defining your expenses though, don't look to get compensated for every home expense that you can. In most cases, your boss will work out the cost of having you as an employee in the office versus having you work from home. At my office, there's a big advantage to having people telecommute, as the space is expensive and there are perks to being in the office (lunches, massages, etc.). In that case, it's a bit easier for my company to figure out the operating costs per employee. I think that some compensation for your connectivity is reasonable, but maybe only if the company already pays your regular commuting costs. Do they pay for your gas? Should they pay for your bandwidth?
Ask your management how much it is costing on a per employee basis for office space, and then ask for some percentage of that amount. If they don't want to share that info with you, look it up in their publically available tax filings. Having knowledge of what they are spending to give you an office will give you a good idea of where to start negotiations.
Like most stuff - the price isn't just based on the supplier's cost - it's based on what the market will bear.
Figure out how much it costs them for you to work in the office.
Figure out how much it costs you to work from home minus how much it costs you to work in the office.
cost is not just money - include time and other intangibles - e.g. no coworkers to chat with can be a minus or plus depending on you and your situation.
If there's a nice value in between that makes both of you happy then you can have a deal.
If there isn't, then you have to figure out something with your boss.
One mistake a lot of small business make at first is to assume that telecommuters will use their personal home computers. Don't. It creates way too many conflicts when it comes to maintence responsibilities. The company should spring for a decent laptop (so you can bring it to the office when you need to be there) and it should remain their property.
Other possible items:
Seperate phone line or cell phone.
Decent Fax machine
Internet access, If they won't pay your entire DSL bill cosider upgrading to the best reasonably priced broadband connection you can get (preferably with a fixed IP) and ask them to pay the difference between that and the basic rate.
If you live in the Southbay, more specifically around Torrance, Redondo or Manhattan Beach, there is an accounting firm called Andrade & Associates. I have been having all my work done by this firm for the past few years and they are always on the ball. They tend to lean a bit more conservative as far as paying out taxes is concerned, however I prefere that to an accountant that will get me everything he /she possibly can and risk having an audit. Good luck.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yes ask what you can do. However remember that just because you can doesn't mean you should! I know small business owners with a dedicated room for the business, dedicated computers. They don't write it off though, because when they sell they pay capital gains on that space, while the rest of the house is tax-free. (They are builders, they build their house for cost every 2 years)
So ask what you can do, but also ask what the downside of doing it is. It might not be worth it. It might be worth paying your own way for something the office will provide. (I don't know of any reason, but this of course varies from country to country)
Ask your boss for a computer to keep things seperate, (they provide software, maint. etc) and Approx $500 for Setup. Desk, Office supplies, a separate phone line from yours. and to pay for the internet connection. Keep everything simple.
I used to work for a major bank and they did that with me. They brought over a desktop, Printer, and had they IT guys come over and set up a network so we could share the cable connection and then locked the computer (like the office) where I couldn't change anything on it of share sensitive files etc. We used a special code card that changed the password every 15 seconds to come in theough a specific gateway to the banks internal network. The card was only one step, we had to still use our passwords, usernames, and somewhere on my pc was a validation code that the bank looked for if someone got past everything else.
Your boss, I assume, will not accept a cable outage as an excuse.
Your company's paying for it, so see if they'll pony up real money for a proper business level 24/7 connection. If not, point out the various problems with using a consumer level connection. You're going to be living on the net, so you'd better have that link locked down tight.
I can't find pricing, but I can't imagine it would be more than $200/month, which I would think is well within the parameters for your company. If it's not, you can always scale back appropriately.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
...a computer! Also, while the basics (Internet, Phone, Print Supplies, Fax, etc) should obviously be included, so should the percentage of rent/mortgage for the space you use as an office. I would probably include an umbrella insurance policy since I assume workplace insurance policies do not apply to telecommuting.
a polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate change.
My ex-wife had an office in the front of our house for two years. Our electric bills jumped more than I thought they would from increased electricity. In Florida, most people turn the air conditioning to a warmer temp during the day to save money. With her home all day, the a/c was on, as well as the tv and stereo. Make sure you factor in increased utilities to the equation. Plus, if I recall correctly, the IRS won't give you a deduction for home office unless its 100% used for work. If that's the case, you are losing part of your home for storage and your use. If there are a lot of files and things to store at home, make sure you don't end up using your garage for work items.
Panic now, beat the rush!
Seems there's plenty of good suggestions in this thread for telecommuting. I just have one to add. My co-author Minda Zetlin wrote "Telecommuting for Dummies" (published by Hungry Minds, now a Wiley books company) a couple years ago, and it has some very good info on how to go about setting yourself up as a telecommuter. I can highly recommend it - and not just because I was her favorite dummy. (She used my experiences telecommuting from Woodstock, NY to SanFran Bay area in the book a lot.) Good luck telecommuting!
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