Expense Reimbursement & Time Tracking

Updated 2025.02

Key procedures for partners to ensure Pax Fauna's accounting follows laws and meets transparency standards.

Time Tracking

Please track your time in the following categories in a way that balances accuracy and ease. If you forget to track time, do your best in retrospect.

The purpose of time tracking is threefold:

First, it’ll give us some documentation of what percentage each employee spends on lobbying and exempt activities. This is important because our 501c3 can only spend 20% of our resources on lobbying, and no resources at all on electoral campaigns.

Second, it’ll prepare us to file our annual returns to the IRS (and other spending reports for transparency with the public). On these returns, we report how much we spent in each category, and our biggest accomplishments for the year. Because the work ebbs and flows between the two organizations, Clockify can be a helpful tool for reporting what we’ve done.

Third, it provides transparency to ourselves and each other about how we spend our time.

We encourage efficient use of time and healthy work/life boundaries. We think ~35 hours a week is a good normal work week for information workers- much more than this, and your work efficiency and quality probably suffer. It’s okay if some days or weeks are lighter or heavier than others- sometimes you’re not at 100% for whatever reason, and sometimes you get into a flow. You don’t get extra points for working a whole lot, and you won’t be criticized for sometimes working less.

Categorization

Expenses include class, category, and description.

Time entries only need class (called project in Clockify) and description.

Class/ project designations

Please use the following designations when tracking time and expenses.

110 General Programs

Everything else, related to Pax Fauna’s mission. This includes projects, meetings, reading emails and messages, making a to-do list, etc.

120 Research

Research that may eventually be published, such as survey experiments, interviews or other qualitative research, literature reviews, policy development, etc.

130 Lobbying

All work in furtherance of specific campaigns. This includes projects, meetings, reading emails and messages, making a to-do list, etc.

132 Portland Lobbying- reportable

Click "task" to access this designation. Time spent attempting to influence actions of city officials. Include time spent prepping emails and letters and prepping for oral communications with a city official. Track what you’re doing (email, text message, personal/virtual/telephone meeting, meeting preparation) and for which ordinance. Include grassroots lobbying— encouraging our members to reach out to city officials. City officials include electeds and directors of city departments.

If a city official requests information from you and you respond with just that information, or you testify at a City Council meeting, use “Portland Lobbying” but do not use the “reportable” task. Also use only “Portland lobbying” for travel time to personal meetings with officials or City Council meetings.

140 Conference

Time or money spent attending or preparing for conferences, presentations, or networking events.

140 Electoral Candidate Work

Time or money spent supporting candidates who are running for office or running an endorsement process.

610 General Admin

Keeping the lights on: accounting, taxes, compliance, expenses, time tracking. For most people, this will rarely be used because expenses and time tracking take a negligible amount of time. Use “General Programs” or “Lobbying” for things like reading emails and making your to-do list, not General Admin.

620 Retreat

Team building, planning exempt programs, debriefing.

620 Retreat- Lobbying

Retreat time spent planning specific campaigns.

630 Training

Professional development, including time spent attending trainings, preparing for trainings we attend, reading or consuming other media for professional development. Use “General Programs” for trainings we deliver.

710 General Fundraising

Grant writing, meeting and corresponding with donors, preparing fundraising materials

Expenses and Reimbursements

For expenses and reimbursements, we use Ramp.

Be sure to log in to, and use the card from, the correct organization for the expense you're incurring.

Please review Ramp’s how-to guides for the following subjects:

Submitting Expenses

Submitting Mileage and Reimbursements (Note: you can only use your phone number to text receipts for one account, choose it wisely.)

Automatically Forward Receipts to Ramp

Subscriptions

For subscriptions or recurring online vendors, please create a new virtual card by using “Request Spend.” This way, you can save yourself time by inputting some of the required information to be automatically applied to each transaction, and you protect the organization against accidental overcharges.

Alternate Reimbursement Procedure

If, for whatever reason, Ramp is not working, you can also use Gusto to submit reimbursements. Please notify the Operations Lead if you use this method.

To submit expenses made with a personal credit card or cash, login to Gusto. It’s best to use Google Chrome for this.

On the left side of the screen, select “Expenses”.

On the Right side of the screen, click the + button

Attach a receipt. The receipt must show the amount that was paid, who was paid, and what was paid for. Bank statements don’t work for this.

Select a category that best describes your expense.

In addition, manually write a class in the “description” of the expense. Classes are listed above.

For example, if I pay for printing posters for the Denver campaign, I’ll select “8160 Printing and Copying” and I’ll write in the description a class listed above.

“130 LOBBYING: posters for volunteer recruitment”

Or, if I rent a car for a retreat I’ll select “8360 Vehicles” and write “620 RETREAT: Rental car for St Louis retreat” in the description.