

Ask HN: At what point should a startup pay for a personal cell phone? - philip1209

With required on-call, mandatory two-step verification, etc - at what point should a company be paying an employee&#x27;s cell phone bill?<p>In California - at what point are they legally required to do so under <i>Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service, Inc.</i>?
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davismwfl
In general, once the usage of the phone becomes primarily for business
purposes. For example, if you are requiring an employee to carry the phone at
all times and to answer it after hours and deal with clients, it is a business
usage and should be paid for by the company. However, that does not mean that
the entire service should be reimbursed as many people now have family plans
and paying the entire service would unfairly burden the company as well.
Additionally, technically if they did reimburse the entire bill, you likely
would owe taxes on the non-business reimbursement as it is "income". One other
point, if the business is requiring 100% cell phone access, in many states an
employee may have a claim to additional pay, even if salaried.

If the company is asking you to provide them your cell number for on-call
times only and for notification of an issue when you are already being
compensated for on-call time then likely it is more gray and not a
"requirement" to reimburse you. However, I have seen most companies still do
something in these cases.

Generally in a startup though, you are not there because you are worried about
getting the $50-$100 monthly reimbursement because startups are generally
focused on results not building up the enterprise systems to track this type
of stuff (until they mature more). To my point, you are generally investing
your time beyond 8 hrs a day, and are likely not taking a market level salary
in lieu of options so it would seem the cell phone is a minor thing in the
end. Just my opinion though.

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KhalPanda
Legalities aside (IANAL, not based in California, etc), can't you just
reimburse employees for any extra expenses incurred outside of their tariff,
rather than having an entire extra phone?

If an employee doesn't want to give their number out, just purchase a number
that can be forwarded. Or if there is a large volume of company calls, I'd
have thought you'd have been at a point financially where an extra phone is a
trivial expense?

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1123581321
I can't speak to California law, but you simply factor the mobile into your
total overheard and budget the salary portion of it accordingly, i.e., over
time, if you're paying $20,000/year for phones, you will probably be paying
about $20,000/year less in salaries/equity EV equivalent.

