Finances and Salaries
A collection of posts on Finance and Salaries
We’ve shared a number of parts of Buffer’s business transparently over the years — and one piece we’ve always wanted to expand on is where your money goes when you pay for a Buffer subscription. We shared a post about where your money went when buying a $10 Buffer plan back in 2014 — but it was well time for an update. A lot has changed over the last nine years, and we want to share some of the learnings and insights gained from looking back at our numbers. We’re also happy to share a more su
Seeking opportunities to give back has always been part of the Buffer DNA. We started the wonderful tradition of profit sharing and charitable contributions at the end of 2017. Since then, we've been in the privileged position to make donations to charitable organizations every year as part of our profit sharing. We set aside 8 percent of our 2021 profit for profit sharing, we then match 20 percent of that total for our charitable donations. This came to a total of $17,966 for this year’s chari
Every year we increase our entire team’s salaries to keep up with market rates. Here's our why we do this and how it impacts operating expenses.
This is Buffer's 2022 pay analysis, a look at our annual progress towards closing the unadjusted gender pay gap at Buffer.
We eliminated two of our lower cost-of-living bands in our salary formula at Buffer. Here's my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.
In 2020, it was more important to us than ever to support small businesses and non-profit organizations. We’d love to highlight the organizations we supported in 2020 and the important work they’re doing, and how we came to support them.
Here are all of our numbers from our 2021 pay analysis, along with more on the positive impact that transparency has had on the gender pay gap for us.
In this post, we share an overview of our compensation philosophy and a simple explanation of our salary formula.
Note: This is the quarterly update sent to Buffer shareholders, with a bit of added information for context. We share these updates transparently as a part of our default to transparency value. See all of our revenue on our public revenue dashboard and see all of our reports and updates here . We've emerged from a cha
Note: This is the quarterly update sent to Buffer shareholders, with a bit of added information for context. We share these updates transparently as a part of our ‘default to transparency ’ value. See all of our revenue on our public revenue dashboard and see all of our reports and updates here . Before I get into the
Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. You can’t improve something if you don’t know that it needs to be improved. That was very true for us four years ago when we first started looking into equal pay at Buffer. We have long used a salary formula to determine all of our salaries – the same role in the same part of the world receives the same salary. That m
Transparency is one of our defining values at Buffer. We are excited to debut a new revenue dashboard!
When Buffer succeeds, we believe everyone on the team should benefit. One of the ways we make this happen is by sharing some of our profits based on our annual financial results. We haven’t always been profitable – here’s a look at our net profit numbers from the last four years: * 2015: $17K * 2016: Loss * 2017: $2.41M * 2018: $3.29M Over these last two years of profitability, we’ve put in place a profit-sharing plan for the whole team, as well as set aside a chunk of money for charitab
Thanks for reading our equal pay report. See our updated 2021 pay analysis here. Progress seldom looks like the straight line we all wish it might. Real life is much messier, filled with false starts, mistakes, and backtracks. That’s an especially tough truth when it comes to issues like the gender pay gap that affect real people’s lives so deeply. But in advance of this year’s Equal Pay Day, Buffer has a progress story to tell – and it looks nothing like a straight upward line. What is E
Hi there! This is an out of date post that we’ve kept around for transparency purposes. Go here to view the latest version of this post or view our salaries page . We live in a world where things are constantly changing, and Buffer is no exception, especially when it comes to how we pay our team! It’s been over five years since we first introduced transparent salaries and a salary formula [https://buffer.com/resou
Highlights: * We spent $93,653 in August 2018 * We spent $3,041 on ads. We budget $4,000 per month (total!) * We spent $3,151 on software tools (our stack includes 28 paid tools) * Grab your free marketing budget template Tweet this ☝️ When I first started managing our marketing budget, I was a bit over my head. To put it mildly. What software were we actually spending money on? I didn’t know. What made sense for a monthly ad spend? Not sure. How much should we budget for the followi
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Starting the conversations, negotiations, and process of this buy out was one of the most important decisions I’ve made in the Buffer journey so far, and it was the culmination of more than a year of work. This is a key inflection point for Buffer that puts us truly on a path of sustainable, long-term growth. Here is the full journey of how we decided on t
Editor’s Note: Here’s part 1 in the series, A Transparent Look Inside Our Process For Creating Buffer’s Annual Budget. We believe that numbers tell a story and we hope that anyone looking at our budget for the first time will have a good idea of what we value based on how we’re planning to spend our money. Last month we shared our approach to creating a budget. Today, we’re excited to invite you to take a closer look at how that approach led to allocating dollars in our budget and how that inf
Though to many, creating a budget might sound rather uninteresting and isn’t necessarily synonymous with the exciting fast-paced growth of a startup or scaleup , we believe it is, in fact, a core part of creating a sustainable and healthy company. (Which is what makes budgeting so exciting to us!) We haven’t always used a budget at Buffer to guide us towards financial health and our long-term g
Editor’s Note: Thanks for checking out this post! We’ve released our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we’ve always marched to the beat of our own drum when it comes to how we pay our team. We make our salaries transparent to the whole world. We calculate all salaries with a fully transparent (and publicly available) formula. And we’ve been proud to be part of the Equal Pay Day conversation for the past two years, by sharing our full data in a transparent pay analysis. For Equal Pay D
Heads up! We’ve updated our transparent salary formula since this post originally was published. Learn more about the latest formula and see all the team’s current salaries here . Four years ago we introduced transparent salaries at Buffer. The practice has in many ways come to define us. We’re proud of this, and the positive impact that it has had both within the team and in the wider community. A growing company brings change and new learnings. Over time, our tea
Thanks for reading our equal pay report. See our updated 2021 pay analysis here. At Buffer, we feel a close connection to the conversation about salaries. We strive to pay all employees fairly and equally, as evidenced by our adoption of a transparent salary formula. We share this formula publicly (you can try it for yourself here), and we share the actual salaries of the entire Buffer team: Every one of our salaries is available in a transparent spreadsheet. We whole-heartedly embrace trans
One of the most difficult parts about interviewing with a new company can be negotiating salary. There are tons of tips out there, and one of the most helpful is to know what someone in that position might earn before going into the negotiation. It may seem like a small detail, but negotiating on the front end can have an exponential effect on your earnings over time. One calculation shows that with an average annual pay increase of five percent, an employee whose starting annual salary was $5
Hi there! This is an older post that we’ve kept around for transparency but that means that sometimes the information is no longer accurate. Head to our homepage to view our most recent posts. I truly believe our value of transparency makes Buffer a better company than we might be otherwise. There wasn’t one specific reason why we began to share so openly about nearly everything we do, like: * Salaries of all team members * Revenues of Buffer’s combined paid plans, consisting of the Awesome
