I once booked a room at a very modest hotel for a conference. As some hotels do, they referred to their basic room as a “deluxe room”.
When my office manager submitted the receipt for reimbursement, the University’s travel office made her get a letter from the hotel confirming that it was their shittiest room and not some sort of fancy upgrade.
Problem with that is that the per diem amounts may not have anything to do with real pricing in the location you are traveling to. It may well be that the per diem will only cover a stead diet of McDonalds for the week.
I concur - the places that I worked that had a per diem, you had to list how many days you were traveling and they’d just pay you the full per diem amount for each day. No receipts or proof that you actually ate anything at all required. So if you wanted to live off Ramen & convenience store burritos for a week and pocket a bunch of cash, there was nothing to stop you.
Other places had a maximum amount per day, which is what wolfpup seems to be referring to - they’d reimburse up to $50/day, but raised a fuss if you submitted $30 for 6 days, then a $170 bill for the 7th. The secret there of course is to get as close to $50/day as you can, even if it meant ordering an appetizer and dessert that you only took one bite of. If the company isn’t interested in working with you a bit, then why should you put any effort into saving them a penny?
I went to a big annual conference last year, but had so many approval problems, that this year… I ain’t goin’.
Instead of the big conference in LA, I found a smaller one in Chicago. I can drive, so I’ll avoid the claustrophobia of flying, I won’t have to deal with So. California freeways…
And I’ll never even hint to The Evil Reimbursement Lady that I want any of my expenses back. So NO PAPERWORK! It’s worth a couple hundred of my own money to avoid the time, stress and humiliation.
Oh I agree. I don’t think the system wolfpup mentioned was really a per diem, because it still involved receipts.
You’re right, it is a “per mealem” - covers situations where you’re away all day, when you get the full per diem, but also situations when you leave the office in the morning and get back at three - you claim for lunch, but not breakfast or supper.
I think the rule is that to claim breakfast, you have to have left your home before 7 am and hit the road. To claim supper, you have to not get home until 6 or 7 pm.
Evil Reimbursement Lady #1 reads digs’s post, cackles nefariously and shows it to Evil Reimbursement Lady #2: “Our plan is working! Travel expenses down this quarter! We’ll get our performance bonus for cost-cutting!”
Then they go out and smoke in the parking lot with Patty and Selma from the nearby DMV, and exchange tips and war stories.
We had someone get fired 2 months ago for this exact situation. Mind you, this organization had fired NO ONE in the 70 YEARS prior.
Do not fuck with receipts!
Yeah, the set rate per day is how the military does it. So much easier. Plus I only needed receipts for anything over $75. Lot’s of $74.99 cab rides. 
(just kidding about the cab rides)
Also, this:
is a foreign concept to me.
My company (and lots of others I’ve heard) uses Concur for managing expense reports. I just take a picture of the receipt with my iPhone, and immediately email it to a certain email address. Then when I log in to the web site to do a report, the receipt is there waiting for me. It’s really convenient because if I do this as soon as I get the receipt, I never have to even take the paper and keep up with it.
That does sound very slick! I’m always losing the receipts.
We use a system where the charge shows up on the card website after a couple of days, categorized by provider type, and all you have to do is click the box for the ones that apply to a particular expense report. No actual receipt is usually required, but scanned PDF’s work fine when they are.
I don’t think that’s it. Keeping track of $60,000.00 worth of expense receipts for years seems like much more work than just submitting them. But I can’t believe your company didn’t have a written policy requiring expenses to be submitted by the end of the quarter or somesuch.
Only one time have I been turned down on an attempt to save money. I could fly out of my local airport for $xxxx round trip or drive an hour to another airport and the bottom line difference including the mileage was a bit over $500 saved. Normally this would have been rubber stamped, but not this time. The reason? Only a couple of months left in the fiscal year and there’s too much money in the travel bucket.
Another chapter in the Marathon of Nonsense reference book.
If you have money left in your budget at the end of the year you get a haircut next year because obviously you don’t need that much money. (Can’t decide if this needs a headsmack or rolleyes smily)
Agree with you and Shodan - in many workplaces, submitted a forged expense receipt is a firing offense.
Yes. At my place, if the claim is more than 6 months old, it needs special sign-offs.
And no claims once the fiscal year closes, except for unusual circumstances.
This story does my heart good! LOL
Sure. Until the conscience of the rule-following employee gets the better of her and she goes to the boss and confesses.
At that point, it doesn’t matter whether the two of them were entitled to the re-payment.
Management’s reaction will be that:
(1) we have an employee who can forge receipts so well that our accounting department is fooled;
(2) that employee has used her talents to make a claim without the required documentation and has gotten a pay-out;
(3) that employee is encouraging other employees to make claims without the required documentation.
I think it’s pretty clear what management’s next step will be.
I imagine that they do NOW…
We don’t have a policy that they be done by the end of a quarter, nor any about fiscal year boundaries. Charges on the corporate credit card which have not yet been filed on a report get some attention from the nags in India. But this guy’s charges were on his own card, so they didn’t know about them.
I don’t know what the corporate statute of limitations is for charges - I don’t push it. I did an expense report recently that had some three-month old charges, but that’s about as far as I go.
I’ve worked for places which had different per diems by location. The current one, for example; there are different per diems for each of their own locations because yeah, prices aren’t the same in Canada, England and Spain.
The most generous one (we were subcontractors):
Every worker at the Home Office (where our team worked part of the time and was officially based) receives a set daily amount to offset the cost of lunch there. The amount is the same as what many other companies in the area give as lunch tickets, without the limitations of these. OK, we got this whenever we were at home office.
Since most of our time would be spent in a different location, the company tallied how much it cost them to have one person there for one day on a pay-for-everything basis (hotel, meals, cabs) and gave that amount to us.
They also tallied how much they paid for each flight (British Airways). Again, we got this amount.
So, each month, we submitted the list of which days we’d been in each location (easily verifiable just by looking at our meetings), and got back an amount based on “days at home office + days at away location + flights in between since consultants can’t teleport yet”, and we spent it whichever way we wanted.
There were some pretty nasty things about that job (well, mainly our direct manager’s IQ and EQ), but damn the expenses part was nice!