Spending Requests and Reimbursement

ProgHist Ltd raises money so that the Programming Historian Editorial Board to spend it to grow, improve, and sustain our work.

As agreed at 1593 spending requests should made using the following process:

1. Team Leaders put in spending requests to Finance Manager (currently, Baker) via email to programminghistorian@gmail.com. Requests should be on the Expense Request Form.
2. Finance Manager discusses request from Team Leaders and makes decision, seeking advice from wider team as appropriate.

To ensure that Team Leaders know what level of spending is feasible, ProgHist Ltd Board of Directors Meetings - held circa every 4 months (e.g. 1594) - will review and report back to the ProgHist Members (that is, the all of the Project Team, see 1579) via minutes on income, spend, and current value of Patreon and Institutional Partner Programme support.

For 2021-22, all Publications have a £300 budget to support outreach activities, which can be spent using the guidance on this page, at the discretion of managing editors in conversation with their team members.

Ongoing costs

In the case of some ongoing costs, such as copyediting, it is time consuming for Team Leaders to ask for approval each time spending is required. In these instances, we ask that Team Leaders estimate expected spend before the start of the financial year (1 October) and communicate that estimate to the Finance Manager. Once approved, they will add those estimate to the budget projections for the financial year and work with the Publishing Assistant to keep track those ongoing costs (for example, how many copyedits the Spanish team have used since the start of the financial year). In the event that an ongoing cost is close to the estimated spend (for example, the Spanish team have used 4 of 5 copyedits by April), the Finance Manager will contact the Team Leaders who made the estimate to discuss is the budget needs to be increased.

Closing a line of spending

Spending isn't forever, so as agreed at 1796 we have a light policy in place for closing a line of spending, specifically:

The Treasurer has the authority to unilaterally halt all spending (for example, in the event of unexpected collapse in cash flow). However, this is a last resort. In most cases, if the Treasurer deems it necessary to plan for reduced spending (for example, our surplus is steadily being reduced or we are notified that a key income stream will be coming to an end), the Treasurer will bring a recommendation to the attention of the ProgHist Ltd Directors and directly impacted Team Leaders.