Spending money

There are many occasions when you will need to spend company money. PostHog is a lean organization - the less we spend, the more time we have to make sure the company takes off. However, it is more important you are productive, healthy, and happy.

PHILOSOPHY & GUIDING PRINCIPLES 📙💭

PostHog operates on a context-based expense policy inspired by the book 'No Rules Rules'. We're empowering team members to make good decisions while maintaining transparency and accountability.

Ask yourself:

  • Can you clearly explain why this expense is in PostHog's best interest?
  • Would you be comfortable explaining this expense to the entire team publicly?

If the answer is yes, it is likely the expense is in the best interest of the company and supports your productivity.

If not, think again.

When in doubt, ask your team lead for context, not permission.

HOW IT WORKS 🏭

  • All company expenses (offsites, software/tool subscriptions, merch, etc.) will have common company-wide budgets.
  • You'll be assigned a single 'User Limit' of $5,000 per month from which you can spend money on individual subscriptions, coworking/collaboration, training, etc. If you need an increase in the limit, request it on Brex.

TRANSPARENCY & ACCOUNTABILITY 🧑‍🏫

  • All expenses are visible company-wide: we believe transparency drives better decision-making.
  • Accountability: If we have questions about an expense or need documentation, we'll reach out for clarification.
  • Team lead oversight: Monthly reports showing all direct report expenses.

LOGISTICS ⚙️

UK EMPLOYEES

Use your Revolut if

  • the expense is over £75, and
  • has UK VAT on it.

If not, use your Brex.

Why? The company can claim back VAT on these larger purchases - the more money we claim back, the more money we have to #DoMoreWeird

RECEIPTS 🧾

All expenses over $75 or £75 must have itemized receipts attached and memo updated within 14 days of the charge (required for audit documentation).

Expenses with no receipts above $75 or £75 may be deducted from your pay if we can't verify the business purpose - this is mainly for repeat issues where someone's clearly ignoring the policy.

We need an itemized receipt/invoices (for example, the full booking confirmation email PDF for flights/hotels, detailed bill from the restaurant for a team dinner) - because Brex auto-verifies these using the information on the file.

  • Please do not upload cropped images that show just the amount or just the credit card machine confirmation slip - without context, the receipt is pointless.
  • Similarly, our UK accountants review the expenses and determine our tax compliance, which isn't possible without a detailed receipt/invoice.

Template for a thorough memo

  • What: [item/service purchased]
  • Why: [business reason - how this helps PostHog/your work]
  • Context: [relevant details - who attended, what project, etc.]

EXPENSE REVIEW 🔎

Finance will be verifying:

  • All expenses over $1000 (Brex),
  • Sampling of expenses under $1000 (Brex),
  • All expenses on Revolut.

We may adjust these thresholds depending on bandwidth in the team.

Team Leads

Expense reports will be shared with team leads monthly for their oversight and verification since they have the most context on their team's workings. This additional context and oversight will also be helpful to justify the context-based spend to the auditor. It is up to team leads how much scrutiny they take on reviewing these expenses.

WHY DOCUMENTATION MATTERS 🏦

  • Missing receipts and memos create extra work during audit season - auditors will need to dig into those expenses, which means hours of back-and-forth with you about charges from several months ago! A quick receipt upload and memo update now saves everyone time later.
  • Additionally, we're legally prohibited from paying personal expenses on behalf of team members. Poor expense documentation can:
    • Put PostHog at risk of tax penalties and fines,
    • Result in audit findings that appear in investor discussions,
    • Force us to move to a restrictive pre-approval expense system.

The flexible, trust-based policy we have only works when everyone maintains proper documentation. If team members consistently fail to upload receipts and add memos, we'll either need to implement rigid pre-approvals for all spending, or treat repeated violations as performance management issues.

BUDGET STRUCTURE ON BREX 💳

While we won’t enforce hard spend limits, we will continue to use budgets and limits on Brex for the following reasons:

  • Audit: maintaining budgets and limits help with proper categorization and tracking of expenses by department and function. Without this, detailed financial reporting for audits will involve a lot of manual intervention.
  • Financial Reporting: accurate categorization of expenses is essential for Board reporting, tax compliance, and to track actual spend against budgets.

These budgets are for categorization and reporting purposes only - they do not create spending restrictions:

  • Offsite budgets - managed by Kendal:
    • Whole company offsite
    • Mixed team offsites
    • Small team offsites
    • Onboardings
  • Company software budget: all subscriptions/tools for the company (Janani will be taking over as billing admin for company software subscriptions)
  • User Limit of $5,000 per month, per user: co-working/collaboration costs, training, individual software subscription, etc.
    • For subscriptions and other recurring monthly expenses, we recommend using the virtual card under your User Limit to ensure it gets categorized to the correct budget by default

If you're joining an offsite, please only use the offsite budget - it helps the People & Ops track travel spend accurately against budgets. Let Kendal know in #team-people-and-ops.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 🤨

  • Can I use my personal card for a work-related expense?
    • No, you must use your Brex or Revolut for all work-related expenses.
    • The company earns points which we use towards billboard campaigns. The Finance team also doesn't have the bandwidth to process lots of reimbursement requests.
  • Can I use my Brex/Revolut for a personal expense?
    • No, you may not use your Brex or Revolut for personal expenses.
  • Forgot to assign the right spend limit before using your Brex?
  • Can I bulk upload receipts to Brex?
  • Have a new tool/enterprise software subscription?
    • Add Janani as the Billing Admin to manage payments.
  • Need to provide a vendor the billing email for bill payments?
  • Accidentally used your personal card for a work-related expense?
    • Claim a reimbursement with an itemized receipt on Brex within 90 days of incurring the expense, with a memo (context on what was the expense for and why your Brex wasn't used).
    • We cannot process any reimbursements without a receipt.
  • Driving for work-related purposes?
    • Claim mileage reimbursement through Brex
    • Do not separately expense fuel.
  • Accidentally used the company card for a personal expense?
  • Need access to WeWork?
  • Need Finance to pay a bill?
    • Submit the bill using the 'Bill Pay' feature on Brex, with context on what it is for, and which budget the bill should be coming out of, once you have verified it.
    • Finance processes all bill payments on Wednesdays.
  • Wish to upgrade your flight ticket to premium or business using your personal points?
    • Book an economy ticket using your Brex,
    • Upgrade thereafter using your personal points.
    • Can only book premium travel using personal miles or points?
      • Request a reimbursement for the cost of the economy fare in Brex, along with a screenshot of the cost of the economy fare at the time of booking.

ADDRESSING POLICY ISSUES 👮

INAPPROPRIATE SPEND

  • Audit compliance: Expenses that could be construed as personal will be flagged as non-business expenses by auditors,
  • If you pay for a personal expense using the company card, it would constitute a taxable benefit to you. The People & Ops team does not have the bandwidth to handle the admin burden.

So, you may not use your Brex or Revolut for personal expenses.

EXAMPLES OF INAPPROPRIATE SPEND

  • Personal expenses during business travel (for example: gym sessions/fitness classes, groceries)
  • Entertainment subscriptions for personal use (for example: Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.)
  • Expenses that benefit you personally rather than the business
  • Anything you wouldn't feel comfortable explaining publicly

This list will be updated based on common questions/scenarios.

CONSEQUENCES

  • Misunderstanding: you genuinely thought an expense was in PostHog’s best interest, but we disagree - we’ll provide clarification and context,
  • Intentional violation: knowingly and willingly spending money in ways not in PostHog’s best interest or to intentionally circumvent the guidelines will result in the individual being terminated for cause.
    • Continual misuse (multiple transactions flagged frequently) will be treated like policy violation and result in termination for cause.

TEAM LEAD RESPONSIBILITIES

  • We recommend Team Leads review direct report expenses monthly/quarterly to assess if they’re in the best interest of the business. This helps in maintaining oversight over expenses, and approaches the review with appropriate context (Finance won’t always have the best context), which will be important during audits.
  • Address concerning patterns promptly.
  • Lead by example with transparent spending and context-setting.

EXPENSE GUIDELINES 🛠

EQUIPMENT

Laptop & Monitor

Coordinate with Tara who handles most Macbook and Apple Studio Display purchases - ping her on #team-people-and-ops

  • Having equipment purchases centralized helps ensure accurate accounting and tracking of fixed assets for the audit.
  • We expect you to ship the Macbook and Apple Studio Display back when you leave PostHog.
  • Apple Studio Displays are only allowed for Product Engineers (high density screen) and Sales (in-built high quality webcam and microphone) teams
  • Guidelines
    • For engineering roles (product & support), we recommend a Macbook Pro 14-inch M4 Pro, with the 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU upgrade and 48GB of RAM. We recommend the 1TB SSD drive in order to make sure you have enough space to run the full stack locally.
    • For sales roles, we recommend a Macbook Pro 14-inch M4, with 10-core GPU, 16-core and the 32GB RAM upgrade. Again, grab the smallest SSD (512gb)
    • All other roles, we currently recommend a Macbook Air with the latest Apple Silicon processor and 16GB of RAM.
    • Apple offers multiple screen sizes. The larger screen sizes (15 inches +), are disproportionately more expensive. If you are realistically going to do most of your work at home, it is more rational to pick a smaller laptop size, and to get a large (27 inch) monitor.
    • We only purchase laptops with an English keyboard configuration (US, International or British is fine) - this enables us to easily pass your laptop on to someone else if you upgrade or leave.
    • In the exceptional circumstance that you need to purchase your own laptop,
      • Check if Amazon has sales before purchasing through Apple,
      • US only: use your Brex since we earn cashback,
      • UK only: use your Revolut since we claim back the VAT,
      • Do not get Apple care since it doesn't have great value for money.
    • You can request a new laptop if your laptop is over 4 years old or significantly impacting your productivity. We do ask that you do some diligence to make sure it's not a setup issue though - ie other applications aren't hogging the memory, etc.
    • Part of the Mobile team and need to purchase a new phone? Coordinate with Tara.

Yubikey

We enforce the use of hardware security keys wherever we can. Every team member needs two Yubikeys. You can find them on Amazon, and can read more about security keys in the multi-factor authentication entry.

Other equipment

  • Keyboard/mouse/laptop stand: refurbished items would work just fine. Nextstand make great value laptop stands that are portable.
  • If you live in the UK, Office Resale offer a range of like-new refurbished designer furniture, which you might find better value.

SOFTWARE

We are strongly opposed to introducing new software that is designed for collaboration by default. There needs to be a very significant upside to introducing a new piece of software to outweigh its cost.

The cost of introducing new collaborative software is that it creates another place where todo items / comments / communication can exist. This creates a disproportionate amount of complexity.

Our entire stack for collaborative software is pleasingly simple:

  • Google Sheets - spreadsheets
  • GitHub - documents, code, discussion
  • Slack (premium) - chat (although we encourage you to default into discussion of features/strategy etc into GitHub)
  • PostHog - product analytics
  • Figma - design

Individual software is down to your personal preference, and we encourage you to share cool software.

  • There are some tools used by team members individually - if they become more widely adopted, it makes sense to have a company account. Reach out to Tara on #team-people-and-ops
  • Ask for access in #team-people-and-ops to get access to:
    • Loom: you'll be added as a Creator Lite which allows you to record 25 videos/mo at up to 5 minutes in length. Should you need a full Creator account (unlimited videos, advanced features), ask Mine or Simon.
    • Zoom: we use Google Meet by default, but you can use Zoom for free (up to 40-minute calls). Should you need longer meetings, ask Simon. (But does anyone really need longer meetings?)
    • Superhuman: everyone has their own favorite email app, but Superhuman users will make sure you don’t forget theirs. We have a team plan to keep those folks happy with inbox zero and inner peace.
    • Granola: It’s absolutely okay to use AI note-takers so you can stay engaged in meetings without writing everything down. Feel free to choose your own but please be aware of who the sub-processors are to ensure they do not use a competitor for analytics.
  • IDEs: Visual Studio, VIM and PyCharm are the most popular within our team. IDEs range widely in cost; best in class IDE suites can cost up to $700, which is not a great value proposition for most engineers.

SPONSORSHIPS

If you believe an open-source project is fundamentally important to the success of PostHog then we should set up a recurring sponsorship. In this case, see the open-source sponsorship Marketing initiative.

To enable individuals to support projects on an ad-hoc basis, we use Open Collective.

To get setup with Open Collective get in touch with Charles who will add you to the PostHog Open Collective team. From there, you'll be able to make "contributions" (sponsor a project) as the PostHog organization via Open Collective. For more information see the Open Collective payments documentation.

If you find a project that only supports GitHub Sponsors, please ask Charles to set up the sponsorship.

TRAVEL

  • We travel in economy by default and do not pay for business class
    • If you're unsure of your travel plans and believe you may have to cancel, it may be worth spending a bit extra to book flex tickets that allow a full refund to your Brex
    • It may be worth occasionally upgrading to Premium Economy if you're travelling a lot for work and the cost is not unreasonably high, particularly if you're working the next day
  • Consider signing up for programs like Global Entry if you are regularly traveling to countries that offer it, using your Brex; this saves you time, particularly when traveling to the US.
  • When traveling internationally, use your Brex to expense a reasonable eSIM. PostHog does not cover roaming charges for your phone.
  • When using your Brex internationally, use the local currency since Brex generally offers a better exchange rate.
  • PostHog has international insurance for our work trips, so do not buy travel insurance when traveling on behalf of PostHog.
  • It's fine to book your outbound / return flights for a different day to when you are required to be there as long as the flight is a similar price or less.
  • Any other costs outside of the days you are required to be at an event are of course not covered.

    If you find yourself needing to do extra travel outside of the regular things listed above, e.g. you've been asked to take a last minute trip to work on an emergency project, we may pay for a nicer seat here, especially if you are traveling at very short notice or long haul. Ask on #team-people-and-ops if you think this may apply to you. This is intended for genuine one-offs, not where you've decided you'd like to come along to an extra offsite!

  • We strongly encourage team members to try and work together in person when practical. This isn't limited to just working with people in your team, but we expect that you have a reasonable reason you need to work together.
  • If you're in the same place as other team members, even if you aren't directly working together, PostHog will cover the cost of a dinner or a fun activity
  • If you are meeting a user for an interview or a potential customer, we would encourage you to pick up the bill. At PostHog's current stage, a fancy coffee shop is encouraged. A fancy lunch or dinner is not.

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