Part of your job as an employee of Datum is to help us responsibly spend money. 

While we aim to be cost-efficient and purposeful with our resources, we also need to avoid being “penny wise, pound foolish.” In other words, please spend money in a way that you think is in Datum’s best interests.

If it’s a small expense, just buy it using the Ramp card we issue to each employee. This should cover just about every possible spending situation, including travel. Each Ramp card comes with a limit. If you need a one off spend limit increase, you can do this directly within Ramp and the Finance team will automatically be notified.

For larger expenses that don’t fit into the categories below, please suggest amending this policy with a pull request on this page. This avoids lots of one-off exceptions and helps us operate better over time.

Small expenses

For expenses that are under $75 (one time) or under $20/month recurring that we can cancel easily, just do it.

Saving receipts

Make sure you keep copies of invoices/receipts for charges $25 or more on Ramp. If you expense something on a company card and cannot provide an invoice/receipt, this may be deducted from your pay. You are required to upload your receipt(s)/invoice(s) to Ramp within 14 days; if you’re unable to meet this deadline, please reach out to the Finance team.

Ramp

Ramp allows the Finance team to track overall spending within the company, and saves a lot of time and energy across the board. Here are a few tips and tricks:

  • For subscriptions, you can use a virtual card and assign your subscriptions to that virtual card so all those charges will come from that spend limit and not your default card limit.

  • You only need to submit receipts for purchases of $25 or more. Please do so within 14 days. You can either upload the receipt/invoice to Ramp using their web app, phone app, Slack, email receipts@ramp.com or text/SMS it to Ramp. 

  • Please do not upload cropped images that show just the amount. It must be itemized. 

To help us with our financial reporting, please provide a justification for each expense. A little detail goes a long way. 

Personal reimbursements

You should default to using your Ramp company card in all cases. 

  • Please avoid using your personal card over your Ramp card. 

  • If you can’t use your Ramp card for some reason, ask Steve to make the purchase. 

  • If you do use a personal card, please use the request reimbursement function in Ramp.

Personal expenses should be submitted within 60 days of incurring the expense, otherwise these will not be repaid.

Accidentally bought something on the company card when it was a personal expense? Tried changing the payment method with the merchant and it’s too late? Don’t worry! If you used your Ramp card you can login to Ramp, find the charge and use the repay function (see the Ramp employee repayments guide for details). 

Making larger purchases

If your purchase fits within the policy below, there is no need to ask. We cannot pay you back for anything without a receipt if you use your personal card.

Equipment

Datum is a remote-first company. This means it’s important you have a good setup at home to be as productive as possible. If you need something to do your job and you don’t already have it (e.g. a good desk or chair), we will help to provide it.

Laptops

We’d prefer you to use a laptop. This is very useful when we meet in real life, or when visiting a client. You should use an Apple laptop unless there is an exceptional reason why you can’t. 

  • Apple offers multiple screen sizes, but the bigger screen sizes are way more expensive than the smaller machines. 

  • If you are realistically going to do most of your work at home, we suggest getting a smaller laptop size and pairing it with a nice large monitor. 

  • You need to purchase a laptop with an English keyboard configuration so that we can easily pass your laptop on to someone else if you upgrade or leave. 

  • Amazon regularly offers discounts on Apple products of around 10%, so check there.

  • If you buy from Apple, you may be asked if you wanted to purchase Apple Care: please don’t.

You can request a spend limit to buy a new laptop if your laptop is over 4 years old or significantly impacting your productivity. Just do this in Ramp. 

Monitors

For monitors, we suggest you pick one that supports 4K. This means you’ll get a higher resolution than a standard HD monitor, and thus can fit more content onto the screen. We’ve had great success with Dell monitors over the years. 

For engineers (because of the high density screen), we recommend a Mac Studio Display, as long as you can get them for < $2k. If you buy one and leave Datum, we do expect you to ship these back to our NYC office. You do not need to have a fancy display if you don’t want one!

Headphones

If you need to work in a noisy environment and don’t already have noise cancelling headphones with a microphone, feel free to buy a pair. We would expect to spend <$250 on noise-cancelling headphones.

Software

Software expenses are treated as above and will generally fall into trivial.

We are strongly opposed to introducing new collaboration software, and we’ll ask you to justify it with a meaningful process if you see the upside. This is because introducing new collaboration software creates another place where tasks and conversations can exist. This comes at a huge cost to the wider team.

Our entire collaboration stack is fairly simple and we’d like to keep it that way:

  • Google Workspace - Email, docs, spreadsheets, presentations

  • GitHub - Documents, code, discussion, project management

  • Figma - Design and collaboration whiteboards 

  • Slack - Chat (although we encourage discussion of features/strategy in GitHub)

  • Discord - Community engagement 

  • Helpscout - Support tickets 

  • Sentry - Software quality and error debugging

  • Grafana - Visualization and incident management

Individual software is down to your personal preference, and we encourage you to share stuff that you find useful. Each person has $100 per month for individual software use. Anything that has one or more other people using it should have its own shared budget (just request this in Ramp using the “shared card” feature).

AI tools

This is expected to be a dedicated monthly budget to help you enhance your work productivity and empower you to ship faster. This budget of USD $300 per month for Engineers and is separate from your regular software subscription. It is meant for work related tools only, such as AI coding assistants / IDE’s, API credits, and other AI tool subscriptions.

Folks outside of Engineering should use their individual software budget for AI tools to start.

Optional software

There are other tools some team members choose to use individually. In those cases, as they become more widely adopted in the company, it makes sense to have a company account. Ask for access in #onboarding-tool-requests.

  • Zoom Pro
  • Cap Screen Recordings
  • Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop

Travel

If you need to travel on Datum’s behalf for in-person onboarding, meeting customers, and offsites, again please spend money in the best interests of the company. See our travel expense policy for more details.

Budget for working together/socializing

As a global team, we don’t get many opportunities to work with each other or socialize outside of offsites. However, we do encourage project / product / functional team members to try and work together in person when practical. As such we provide everyone with a $1500 quarterly budget to cover the cost of travel, accommodation, and meals. This budget is in addition to things like in-person onboarding and broader team offsites. Any unused budget does not roll over into the next quarter.

Socializing

If you’re in the same place as other team members, even if you aren’t directly working together, Datum will cover the cost of a dinner or a fun activity. This will also come out of your $1500 quarterly budget. Again, just spend the money in the best interests of the company.

Customer meet-ups

We encourage team members to meet with users, partners, and key customers in person. This type of travel is separate from your quarterly “working together” budget. This enables us to track the budgets and costs separately. To cover costs for travel, accommodation, and meals when meeting customers, please submit a separate budget request in Ramp.

When submitting your request, please provide details of your arrangements and the purpose of the trip, which is required to justify the budget and costs to the auditor, and to ensure that our records are complete.