Reimbursement for printing costs

Why aren't you storing these electronically? If you are doing this for your own benefit simply because you prefer paper then I personally would not ask for reimbursement. If you are doing it for the benefits of others then I can see justification for thsi.

I'm not looking to be reimbursed for my time, just for the out of pocket expense in printing the documents.

Our property manager doesn't provide the service that I listed in the previous post, but I do it for more effective and efficient board meetings.

We always reimbursed for stuff like this IF it is part of your normal duties like being Secretary. It's always best to make sure it's approved before taking on the responsibility. Otherwise, I'd use a service like Kinko's or Staples to print out copies for them to pay the expense.

Check your HOA/COA's governing documents for a short section about reimbursing directors for out-of-pocket expenses like the ones you describe. If this section exists, and you have receipts, submit them and ask for reimbursement. I think it's pretty common to do so. I do not care how small it is, with the caveat that maybe wait until $50 or more of receipts has accumulated.

I expect that you are on the board.

With this expectation, I offer the following:

Request from the board to be reimbursed for a printing cartridge and ream of paper citing what you provided.
If approved, purchase those items and provide a receipt.

If not approved, you will have to eat the cost or learn to be paperless.

I wouldn't request such a reimbursement more then once a year.

Kudos to you GregM14 for wanting to stay organized and come prepared to board meetings, ready for discussion and decision-making.

I'm with Tim on this one . . . discuss this with your Board and if agreeable, you can/should be reimbursed for a reasonable amount of ink/toner and paper. You're doing a voluntary thing on behalf of the rest of your HOA members. You don't also need to shell out your own money (regardless of how much/little it actually is) to do what needs to be done. Some will argue that it's not necessary, which may be true for them. But everyone works differently and hard-copies of documents are often simpler and more efficient to work with for certain people.

Tim's approach is better than figuring a per page cost and then spending time calculating how much is owed to you each month.

The spiral binding, while nice, is a bit excessive IMO. If that's something you want to continue, it'll have to be on your dime. Or perhaps you can add a couple boxes of binder clips into your reimbursed costs and that'll do about the same job for quite a bit less expense.

If others desire the same as you, then it should be approved for them as well. However, if people approved for this do not end up printing documents and do not come prepared to meetings, then they should pay that money back to the HOA. This could be a stipulation of ink/toner and paper reimbursement as well.

Greg,

If you are printing these documents as an official board member - and not a property owner - then such supplies costs should be reimbursable by your HOA unless the HOA dictates that you should compile them electronically.

Ultimately, it's a courtesy to reimburse you for your personal choice of printing paper copies but it's not unheard of to help you out.

I recently converted our Covenants, Bylaws, and R&R's from PDF to MS word via a PDF converter. I broke them down into 3 separate docs. I did have to manually clean them up a bit as PDF to Word was not 100%. I eliminated the Plat Plans and signature pages attached to them. It is now real easy to search them when a topic comes up.

I added a disclaimer on each that they were converted docs for reference only and the original PDF is the proper legal doc.

Our meetings are held in our clubhouse which has WIFI. I always bring my laptop and avoid paper whenever I can. I realize this is a personal preference. We also bought a inexpensive projector and pull down screen so that when needed we can display it for everyone. When we are having a discussion, I like the ability to be able to search for related information such as emails or documents on my laptop.

You're asking about being reimbursed for printing the documents for your board colleagues, which would come out of HOA money, so if it takes less time and money to do something, that option SHOULD be considered. Do what you like with your money, but when it comes to HOA money, it's EVERYONE's money.

No one's questioning your contribution, but YOU'RE the one who chose to print out this stuff and give it to your colleagues. How many times did you do that before it dawned on you this was getting pricey and perhaps you should ask them if they even wanted copies in the first place? Maybe they were ok with electronic copies, so you could have stopped or printed them for some and skip the others. Perhaps be more selective about what you copied and only bring the stuff that you know you're going to ask about.

You're entitled to your opinion, but I've attended all sorts of business meetings where everyone has a laptop and uses it to review documents. No one's complained it was inefficient or rude - usually, the discussion starts with "we're going to review X", people pull it up on their laptops or tablets and away we go. There have been a few meetings where something was pulled up on the screen by the moderator where everyone could see it for discussion, and people made their own notes.

Once again, go talk to your COLLEAGUES and see how they want to address this. Personally, I'd talk to the property manager about printing out everything, come up with one cost per page (factoring in toner, paper and the amount of time needed to print all this stuff), add it to your budget (perhaps the office supply line item or the management fee), and move on.

That would be more practical than you coming up with a cost because I suspect no one wants to argue with you about things like

"Why are you going to X for toner, when it's cheaper at Y?"
"Why do you need such much paper - can't you print all this two-sided?"
"No, we don't want this printed in color - that toner costs more"
"I don't see why we're paying you for toner when you only print X number of sheets a month - seems to me the rest of that toner would be for your personal use - why should the HOA pay that?"
"You say your cost is $25 a year - where are your receipts to document that?"

If the board doesn't want to reimburse you for whatever reason, you have a choice, as others have said - either learn to do this part of the job electronically or eat your costs. As a practical matter, if you learn to do this electronically, that could carry over to other things you might want to do that don't involve association business (maybe this would be a great skill for whatever you do on your job?) But go ahead and do you.

When I was on the Board, given all the time I put into being on the Board, and given the covenants provided for reimbursement for reasonable expenses, no way no how was I going to spend $50 or even $25 on office supplies for the HOA from my own pocket, especially if I was doing a lot of printing regularly. My fellow directors felt the same way.

$50 is a nice lunch with a drink where I am. No way am I donating this to the HOA.

Was the Secretary on a rental property HOA of 189 properties.

I weaned the Board off paper by refusing to print copies of minutes to be approved. One copy off the agenda for each meeting, only.

They whines a bit, but understood printing costs are high, the labor to print is a pain, and since they had the agenda via email printing was wasteful.

Two years it went well - then I resigned from Sec and then from board - the president immediately started wasting about 75 pages per meeting - utterly unnecessary.

My opinion - go paperless - for lots of reasons.