Our company provides a company cell phone for certain employees whose job requires them to be on call.
We are establishing a policy for reimbursing the "not on call" employees for business related calls on their personal cell phone.
Am interested in what others are doing for employees who do not have a company cell phone and what type of backup documentation are they obtaining to substantiate the expense.
Samples of a cell phone reimbursement policy would be greatly appreciated
Your goal to reimburse for cell phone usage is admirable, but will cost you more than it is worth. The amount of paperwork and effort to obtain qualified records will cost you more than a standard national cell phone charge. There is a reason why most companies will have a receipt threshold for t&e. Usually it is around $20.00, which is probably the monthly charge for an individual plan with a certain number of free minutes. Can it be done - Yes. I would only recommend implementing the reimbursement policy if you have international calls, which still are costly.
Agree with Regis - if it's domestic don't get tied up with it. We have quite a few international travelers, so we ask employees to submit their itemized sections of the phone bill for usage, but only the summary section of their bill if it's base data plan charges (for our salesperson's etc.).
Suggest setting a monthly reimbursement amount for different groups of employees. You could require employees to provide justification if they are over their amount. You can require employees to provide the monthly bill as backup each month or you can require that only if they are above their allotted reimbursement amount. It is up to you how much time you want to spend auditing in case of overages.
There are solutions that can help automate much of this for you simply and cheaply. Generally, installing a solution can help you come up with the best policies and also helps to change user behavior to come within that policy pretty quickly.
