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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".
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
Better yet - ask yourself.
... it really works out in your favor.
Last company I was at said 'you can come in to work every day, or you can work from home every day provided you have the ability (ie, high speed internet, a phone, a quiet room with a door, a desk and space to put the laptop.'
Pretty simple math there.
If telecommuting is something you want to do, and if you already have all of the above (lets face it - anybody worthy of telecommuting already has high speed internet, etc) then make it real easy for your boss to say yes : tell him you want a telecommuting budget of $0.
Honestly - how much do you really stand to make? $100 per month maybe? At $6 per workday lunch in the cafe you come out ahead. Add in commute time, wear and tear on the vehicle, gas costs, just getting an extra hour or two back in your day, and the benefit of working in your fuzzy bunny slippers
Otherwise put down a dollar figure you are happy with - say $200 a month to be 'fair' considering cablemodem, phone, 'office rent' for the bedroom you will convert to an office, fax line, etc. What could happen other than them saying yes or them saying no and making you continue driving in to the office each day to sit in your cube.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer