Equipment Purchases (Co or Individual)

[DomP]

We're not a large company (under 100) and was wondering how most organizations handle the providing of PDAs or Blackberry type devices. Is this purely a company expense, shared expense or individual expense?

Thanks,
DomP

 

[lgarner]

Here it's a company expense, at my last job it was an individual one.

If you tell employees that "Thou shalt have a cell phone", then it's up to the company to provide and pay for it. Otherwise, it's purely optional.

 

[mrdenny]

If the company requires that the employee have a cell phone and be reachable at all times the company has two options.

1. Buy a company phone and issue it to the employee.
2. Have the employee bring in there cell phone bills each month and expense them. (The company should be covering the cost of the service and any overages over the basic number of minutes. If the overages get high the company should request that the employee change the number of minutes to a higher number.)

I've used both options and both worked fine. For a smaller company it's probably easier to just expense the cell phone costs, but keep in mind that the company doesn't get any control over what features they are paying for and they can't compain about personal calls on the phone as it is the employees personal phone.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000) / MCTS (SQL 2005) / MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

 

[Corran007]

My prior company issued cell phones to the IT staff. Each phone went to a certain position. Some users knew to directly call certain people when they had certain predfined problems. By issuing them this way, when turnover occurs they do not have to learn a new number.

 

[tomed]

Our company tried to issue cell phones and take care of them for the IT dept but it was too much of a hassle. Now you are responsible for expensing your bill. That seems to work fine for us.

 

[LadySlinger]

My last job the company expensed their own cell phones for all the employees. We also issued digital cameras. At one point my former boss tried to issue a shared payment plan (the employees pay a $100 deposit for their cameras and then can purchase it at the end for another $25).
That shared plan quickly got knocked down because I pointed out that many people were just coming out of unemployment.

 

[dennisbbb]

Over here company takes care of you. Period.

 

[Tarwn]

All of the IT phones at our company are on the group plan. basically it is a tool provided to do our jobs, since we rotate the on call every week and even when we are off call the oncall pair may need some help with something specifically up your alley. Plus it's extremelyhandy during the work day, since we have 5 sites, one across the street, and some of us only see our desks about 50% of the time.
They used to implement a policy where any bill over a certain amount had to be paid out of the employees pocket, but that was rethought when a couple first level users signed up for plans slightly above that limit just so they wouldn't have to pay the overages. Course the original policy was only backed by one person, who has been consistently working their way down the ladder ever since.