How to claim expenses
Last updated: Jul 10, 2025
Generally, only OWASP Staff, Board, Leaders and authorized participants are permitted to submit an expense claim for expenses incurred doing OWASP’s mission.
Expense claims must adhere to the Expense policy.
Depending on the nature of the claim, you will want to use one of these ticket types:
Event Expense Claim - for event leaders only with approved events
Other Expense Claim - for Board travel reimbursements, and other uncategorized expenses
You must submit your expenses within 60 days of incurring the expense. Expenses submitted outside of 60 days will either not be paid, or require escalation to the Executive Director to be paid.
Expense reimbursements are net 30 days unless additional approvals are required. Additional approvals are required for any out-of-policy requests and extraordinary requests that require a Board vote. These are net 60 days.
Initial setup. When making your first claim, you must set up BILL.com. Please set it up in a currency your bank accepts without additional fees. If you get this wrong, please get in touch with us with a new support ticket to rectify the problem. If BILL.com is unavailable in your country, we can process payments via PayPal or international wire transfer. Due to our many difficulties with PayPal over the years, we cannot offer PayPal or international wire transfer as a default alternative to BILL.com. DO NOT ENTER ANY PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION INTO THE Jira TICKET. Enter your address, bank details, etc, into BILL.com. This is to protect your information and to comply with GDPR.
Prohibited countries. Our financial institutions cannot process reimbursements to countries the US Government prohibits. If in doubt, please send us a pre-approval ticket before incurring any expenses, and we will check for you.
No true up. We have received professional advice that, due to US GAAP accounting rules, we cannot “true up” reimbursements, i.e. pay your financial institution’s fees for currency conversion or wire / direct debit / ACH fees. Your financial institution sets these fees, varying tremendously from free to $30 USD or more per transaction. We will reimburse the reimbursement amount for the expenses that have receipts, using the currency conversion rate on the day of processing. If you find fees are eating up your reimbursements, please seek pre-approval to submit your expenses in quarterly batches, as larger transactions generally have a smaller percentage of fees than the total amount being claimed. For example, if your bank requires you to pay $30 for a $50 expense and $30 for a $150 expense, submit three expenses together, and you’ll get more of your money back.