How do you get compensated for travel expenses at work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The Workplace griping thread reminded me of a thread I wanted to post. I have always felt that I am getting the rawest of raw deals when it comes to getting compensated for travel expenses, so I wanted to compare it to what other dopers have to go through, and see who "wins"the contest of worst travel compensation.

First up: I don’t get any compensation for food unless I stay overnight. Period. If I have a four hour trip somewhere, do something, and then a four hour trip back (it’s happened…I had a day start at 5:30 and not end till almost midnight,) they will not pay for a meal. “Bring one with you!” is what they will say…or, I guess since I am gone for so long, bring three with me? Sure thing…:rolleyes:

But that’s a minor thing, since most of my travel is overnight. So here’s how my compensation works:

I get fully reimbursed for things like tolls, rental cars, baggage fees, and sometimes the hotel if there aren’t any that accept direct billing from my university. But I have limits…for instance, I get reamed at if the hotel is much above $100 a night. I had to spend two nights at a hotel in Chicago once…I’ll let you figure out how hard it is to get a hotel in Chicago for under $100, and what the resulting quality would be.

But the worst is meal reimbursement. As stated, if it’s not overnight, I get nothing, but that’s minor compared to the rest. I get up to $40 a day. Not bad, especially when you consider breakfast is almost always whatever crummy free one I get at the hotel. But I not only have to have a receipt for every meal, but it has to be itemized.

This isn’t hard in some places, cause an itemized bill is standard at just about every chain or place that has a decent computerized ordering system…but sometimes I want to go to a more local/“mom and pop” place that looks like it has good food. But in my experience, it is hard to get an itemized bill there. It’s all handwritten slips, so when I ask for a copy for myself, I always get that look from the server or bartender, like,
“Really? You really need me to either fish the copy I gave to the cooks out of the trash? Or write down everything you ordered all over again, along with each thing’s price?”

I feel like a tool-bag for asking.

And then when it’s time for me to fill out my expense report, I have to log in to a website using PeopleSoft software. It’s horrendous and clunky to use. I fill in everything, which takes a lot longer than it should, then I electronically submit it, print out a paper copy, sign the paper copy, hand that, along with my receipts, to the financial person in out department. She then looks it over and approves it, and it gets approved electronically and she sends all the receipts to the financial department. Once there, someone else above her has to look it over and approve it. Once they approve it, they do whatever with the receipts, and the electronic copy goes to a different person in the financial department who actually “writes a check” (i.e., prints one out.) That’s right, I get a physical check, it can’t just be “added on” to my direct deposit paycheck.

Then the check is delivered via inter-office mail to my department, and then our front-office gal sorts through it and puts it in the mailbox for my “division” of my department, and then at some point someone from my division will be at our main office, get our mail, bring it to our location and put it in my actual mailbox.

Oh, but since I have been on practically “perma-travel” for the past couple months, I don’t actually go to my divisions location, I go to the main office one before I leave on Monday morning/Sunday night, but no one remembers when I tell them to leave my check there for me, so I have to go out of my way to get it.

The time between my filling out my report and getting a check is almost two weeks, and even longer after I deposit it for me to finally “get” my money

If I fill out a report Friday afternoon, so that I can give all the receipts and paperwork to them when I get back from traveling, it will get looked at maybe Monday, but probably not till Tuesday. So my department approves it Tuesday, the main financial department gets it Wednesday, maybe Thursday, so it is approved Thursday or Friday. So we’ll say Monday the check is printed, delivered to my department that Tuesday or Wednesday, so if by some off chance I’m not traveling again that week I can get it then, otherwise I have to wait until that Friday afternoon to get it, so even if I deposit it right away, the money isn’t actually in my account till the next Monday or Tuesday.

Annoying. As. Fuck. I really envy the people who fill out a travel thing in advance, and just get X amount per day as a per diem and don’t need receipts and can keep whatever they don’t spend.

2

I went to a modfest in Chicago a few years back, and my husband nearly fainted when I told him what the daily rate was.

I’ll have to ask my husband about his procedures now, but it used to be that he had an Amex card issued specifically for travel, and he put every blooming item on it. I know that they changed this system a few years back.

Personally, I think that this system you have to work with is all kinds of screwed up. I’m willing to bet that there was a more reasonable system in place, but people abused whatever it was.

I think that if you’re gone for over 8 hours, it’s reasonable to reimburse meals after that. I mean, if you normally eat out during the workday, then the job doesn’t need to reimburse you, but if you’re gone for two meals’ worth, then they need to start giving you some eating money.

I’d see if I couldn’t develop some sort of medical problem that prevented that much traveling.

Alternately, I’d try to get some sort of gummint investigation into this.

3

Basically everything that can, goes on the corporate credit card. We have a max of $50 per day in food. After that, it would have to be itemized but I have never had a problem if I went over during a trip once or twice. (Usually when there is no place opened to eat but room service. That can get real pricey real fast.) Other expenses such as taxis that don’t take cards and tips take up to a month to be reimbursed. They allow five dollars hotel maid tip per day and $20.00 bellman tip per trip without a written receipt. It seems very fair to me.

4

Meals: For normal travel, we get paid for the actual cost of meals. There’s supposedly a $50 daily limit, unless you’re in a high-cost city, which is at the discretion of your expense approver. Receipts needed, regardless of the cost. Alcohol is okay.

There are no set hours for when one meal becomes another (so it you’re not eligible for lunch, but don’t eat breakfast, you can use your 12:30 pm receipt for breakfast).

For certain types of extended travel, we get per diems for meals. Per diems are almost always at the IRS (in the States) and GSA rates (foreign).

We don’t get reimbursed for lunch when we’re at a company facility with a cafeteria, except holidays, weekends, and when offsite.

No breakfast if travel begins after 7 am, and no dinner if travel ends before 5 pm. No meal allowance at all for same day travel.

If the hotel offers breakfast included with the company room rate, you don’t get reimbursed for it, unless you leave for work prior to breakfast being served. We’re generally pretty good about what constitutes “breakfast,” meaning if the only breakfast is some crappy continental affair, you can still be reimbursed.

In areas where hygiene is a concern, water is reimbursable in addition to meals.

Hotel: We have a directory of company approved hotels with corporate rates (we’re Fortune 10 company), and as long as the hotel is approved and you book the company rate, the cost doesn’t matter. Must be booked online with our contracted travel agency, unless it qualifies for emergency travel.

Air travel: Must take the lowest, logical-itinerary fare within US$50, booked with our travel agency. Business class is authorized for South America and trans-oceanic flights. When on long term assignments, our travel is reimbursed every second weekend.

Rental cars: Preference should be given to our strategic partners, since we don’t own our own rental company any more. We’re supposed to select “intermediate” but we usually get automatic free upgrades to good cars (although I got stuck with a Hyundai once). For long term jobs, we usually just get loaned a company car.

Misc.: Laundry is approved for trips over two nights. There’s a low limit (under $10 per day), but expense approvers can override this if you use the hotel laundry. Tolls are reimbursed, except for the 407 in southern Ontario. Parking is reimbursed. Tips (except for meals) are reimbursed. Gasoline for rentals and company cars is reimbursed. Car washes for company cars are reimbursed. ATM fees for the company credit card are reimbursed. Local travel, personal auto mileage is reimbursed at IRS rates. Generally you need a receipt for every expense, regardless of amount.

I keep track of expenses in Excel, because our online tool sucks for management. Then when I submit a report, I transfer it into the online tool, and make sure my Excel amounts match the online system amounts. This is supposed to be done every fortnight, but I’ve been getting away with once per month for the last year. We’re supposed to use the company credit card for all expenses – even when on per diem – but the crappy online system makes that so hard that I just use cash when I feel safe, or suck up the 3% currency conversion fee (not reimbursable) on my personal card.

Foreign receipts must be submitted as actual copies for tax purposes. Domestic receipts can be scanned (we even have an iPhone app that’s linked to the Travel/Expense system, and so a camera-phone photo of the receipt is good enough).

Money due to me is paid to my company credit card account, and I take cash advances for reimbursement.

Approval and payment is generally done overnight. If you know that you’ll have a credit balance, you can take the cash out any time you want to, really.

5

From what I understand, that’s probably right.

This is my second time around working for them, and the first time, which was 2004-2006, I didn’t need itemized receipts, and it wasn’t a messed-up online system. It was all just handwritten forms and snail-mail, and yet was faster.

But back then, every department had it’s own way of doing reimbursements, there wasn’t a university wide system/policy in place, and now there is.

They used to reimburse for a lunch if it was travel beyond an hour from where your “main” location was. We even have some people, due to the nature of their job, that are on-call, like a nurse or doctor. Up until just a few months ago, actually, they were allowed up to $10 a day, on the days they got called in, if they got called in before normal working hours. The idea being that since you have to get there so fast, you wouldn’t have time to get food, so when you had downtime after getting called in, you could get reimbursed for it…but now even that is gone. Both of those were gotten rid of as a “cost-cutting” measure by the university.

6

That does sound pretty bad, bouv. I would definitely try to start a movement in your account payable department or what have you to get things changed. Maybe the bureaucracy took over and they don’t realize how unrealistic it is?

We have to follow the federal per diem rates for dining and hotels, but we don’t need receipts for meals. We’re allowed to go 25% over per diem without a justification. Also, you have to be gone more than 13 hours and more than 50 miles from your home location to get meal reimbursements.

Ours must get approved by seven people, so it does take a while to get the money reimbursed (usually two weeks), but it is direct deposited. Maybe that’s something you could ask about too?

7

I charge my expenses and the college reimburses me. There’s a limit for meals, though in the past they never paid much attention. About the only thing they didn’t pay for me was when I played an in-room movie.

I need receipts, of course, but they’re reasonable. I got reimbursed for taking a taxi by showing them a business card from the taxi driver with the amount written on the back. Meals I usually just hand in the receipt, and they know what the hotel will cost when I arrange for the trip and would tell me if it were too much.

8

I’m currently self-employed, but I’m an on-site freelancer. How I get compensated expenses varies from project to project.

In the current project, my rate is all-inclusive; so long as I’m in my “base” location, I don’t get compensated for expenses, but the rate is supposed to be high enough to cover those. I’m supposed to have an upcoming trip and I’m expected to order it through Corporate: the Client will arrange everything and prepay for the hotel, and I (or whomever foots the bill for each meal) can present meal bills to be repaid. There is a cafeteria in my base location and we are requested and required to eat there; people who are on the payroll can have the meals deducted from their payroll and pay a lower price than us “outsiders”. Coffee from the machines is very heavily subsidized for everybody (0.05€/cup), but soda and snacks from those same machines are bloody expensive.

In my previous project, we were considered to be based in Spain but “on location” in the UK; non-inclusive rates. The Client calculated how much would it cost them to send someone internal to the same location for one month and that’s how much they paid us as “expenses” monthly so long as we were “on location” - no need to provide bills, nobody arguing about whether some expense was acceptable or not. If we had to be in Spain for part of a month, we had to apply some complicated formula to deduct part of the stay costs and add meal costs (one of my coworkers set up a Magical Spreadsheet for this).

Years ago I had one where we had to report all expenses via a webpage and

  • you had to provide all tickets (but it was acceptable to miss meal tickets so long as each of them was under $25.00 - missed taxi tickets, your loss),
  • you could only access that webpage from your home office,
  • you had to report all expenses within 30 days of incurring them,
  • you had to pay for hotels and meals yourself and get reimbursed; tickets were paid by the company
  • not everybody had a corporate card (sometimes because we didn’t rate them, sometimes because they were being processed)
  • you could be away from your home office for way longer than 30 days
  • if you had a hotel bill, it was considered to have been “incurred” on the first day of your stay, not on the date you got the bill
    So you could spend 3 months jumping from country to contry and hotel to hotel, then get to your office, spend a whole day or more filing in the bloody report, making sure every damn little ticket was placed in the correct order and photocopying everything, then get the expenses rejected because “you took more than 30 days” (I was away for 97 days, you git), push it back and then have your boss reject it because “one ticket is missing” (for $4.95; as per the attached company policy [exact page, paragraph and lines], I could have charged $24.99 for each one of those 289 meals and not attached a single ticket)… Og but did that system suck!
    (289 because the first day of the trip I had breakfast at home and the last day I had dinner at home)
9

I haven’t had occasion to travel for business for awhile, but a few companies back I traveled internationally for a few weeks with a $40 per diem requiring itemized receipts. It blew.

First, I was working night shift on the trip, so I had to get up in the middle of my sleep pattern to get a free breakfast at the hotel if I wanted it.

Second, there were very very few restaurants available to me. Basically, my choices were pizza or eating at the (extremely loud and rather seedy) casino. Guess how easy getting itemized receipts for pizza delivery from a mom and pop in bumfuck nowhere is?

Third, I tried just getting stuff at the supermarket to subsist, since I was very sick the whole time (caught the mother of all colds en route, I think). I got the third degree when I returned because of a 75 cent roll of cough drops I had grabbed the checkout, and was required to cough up (snerk) this money since it wasn’t strictly food. Also, they were irritated that I bought food at the supermarket to begin with, even after explaining that going to a tourist town in Nova Scotia in February substantially limits your choices, but finally did agree to reimburse. It’s not like I was sneaking back across the border with boxes of crackers, jerks.

Fourth, it was in the middle of bleeding nowhere and prices were high. $40 per diem wasn’t happening if I actually included a restaurant meal in a day. This amount was also supposed to include gas for the rental car, various fees and other things.

I was also at a really awful hotel at first that I didn’t feel safe in and had no fridge. The one night I was there, the ‘breakfast’ I slunk down to get was a roll of supermarket bagels… and nothing else (not even anything to put on the bagel). Fortunately, the locals at least got me out of the seedy cheap hotel and into the good one by deeply shaming my manager, but sadly I was home by the time the receipts were an issue.

Basically, I ended up doing most of the trip on Tim Horton’s for ‘breakfast’ and going to the supermarket over my ‘lunchbreak’ right before they closed to grab crackers and stuff.

They were also very late paying Amex, who called and harassed me personally since it was my first month with the card, and I was threatened that it could affect my personal credit.

Anyway, it sucked.

10

Airfare gets booked through the company’s travel agent, and charged directly to the corporate account. Hotels, rental cars, meals, and other expenses need to be paid for out of pocket and reimbursed, though there is a procedure for getting an advance if necessary to cover such costs. Meals are limited to $50/day, but on a multi-day trip nobody minds too much as long as it ‘evens out’.

There’s no ‘minimum length’ for a trip to be covered. I sometimes need to make short trips the Bay Area (about 80 miles one way) that probably take 4 or 5 hours total, including driving time. I get reimbursed for mileage, bridge tolls, and lunch on such trips. Quite often have to stop at our corporate Data Center on my way to or from the office, since it’s only a short distance out of my way on my daily drive. Technically, I could get reimbursed for the extra mileage I put on making these side trips, but it’s not really worth my time to fill out all the extra forms for those few bucks a week.

We have a fairly simple form that’s printed out (it’s an Excel spreadsheet) with any receipts stapled to it, and it’s sent by inter-office mail to payroll. The reimbursement shows up as an extra check (or direct deposit in my case) on the next payday. I believe there is technically a time limit on how long you can wait to submit expense forms, but I know of people regularly submitting forms for expenses that are 4 or 5 months old without issue.

11

I have a corporate Visa card. Everything goes on that. I think there is a daily food limit but it is high enough that it hasn’t been an issue. My company has a vendor that arranges air travel, hotels and rental cars, so I book through the vendor and pay with the corporate card.

One thing that strikes me as weird about this otherwise simple arrangement is that the corporate credit card bill comes to and is paid by me, and my company issues me a check to cover it based on an expense report I fill out online. I guess that is to make sure I get stuck with paying any disallowed expenses, which hasn’t happened yet.

12

bouv, my situation is painfully similar to yours, and until last month, we had to charge OVERSEAS BUSINESS TRIP AIRLINE tickets to our corporate card, which is paid from our personal accounts. Talk about grab-yer-ankles expense management!

If breakfast is itemized on the hotel bill, we have to pay for it ourselves, out of the $30 per diem we get. WTF??? We get a $30 laundry allowance PER WEEK, which as you might imagine in Japan gets you a clean shirt and not much else.

You have my sympathy, and yer not alone.

13

I’m a small business owner. When I travel, I put everything on my business credit card. The accountant does whatever accountants do.

14

This business of itemizing meals sounds like what I had at U. Ill., since they had to check that the bill included nothing alcoholic.

Now when i travel I would have to pay my own way if I didn’t have a research grant. Since I do, at least till the end of next March, it is pretty easy. Hotel bills are paid without limit. We get a $54 per diem for meals. If you provide receipts, you can get more (I never do). They pay air fare or mileage if you drive. The mileage cannot exceed the air fare (as if anyone could figure out how much the air fare is). Any other receipted expenses (tolls, taxis, etc.) will be covered. For the last few years, the reimbursement has gone to the same account that my salary used to and my pension still does. Needs only one signature (my chairman’s) besides mine. I usually get reimbursed within a couple weeks. Fairly simple and humane.

15

Out-of-state travel is currently restricted (as in, not allowed) for faculty, due to budget constraints, so any travel I’m doing is to conferences in-state. I put in a request to the committee in charge of the professional development funds, or to the Dean, depending on the need for travel. Then, the VPI has to approve it. Then, it goes to HR for THEIR approval. THEN, they arrange for conference registration to be sent, if necessary. I also have to fill out a travel request form detailing how many meals and how much transportation (mileage) I expect to need.

All of that has to be done prior to the travel. Something comes up at the last minute? They’ll consider reimbursing me, but only after calling me polite names in passive-aggressive ways implying that I deliberately waited until the last minute to hide that my request for conference travel is actually an attempt to get reimbursement for money spent on hookers and blow.

In past years, when out of state travel was allowed, we could not book planes or hotels directly - HR required that we work with the travel agent contracted with the state system to make travel arrangements.

It’s a pain in the ass, and it’s designed to be a pain in the ass, to get people to either pay their own way without attempting reimbursement, or to say “Fuck it” and not travel.

16

Was this during prohibition?:smiley:

Seriously, why would an employer care what you drank with your meal? Were fried foods permitted?

17

We have the same restriction. The system will pay for nothing with alcohol - wouldn’t want the taxpayers to think that they’re subsidizing raucous parties.

18

  1. That’s more or less the Tax Code there. If they paid for meals without a overnight stay, there’d be tax issues.

  2. That’s exactly how us Govt workers are paid for hotels, we have a daily maximum.

  3. That does suck, generally Govt workers get a flat “per diem” of about $35.

19

When I worked for a place that was dependent on federal grant funding, we were not allowed to have alcohol on our bills either.

20

Wow. I am at work, and a salesman told me the same thing. He had a govt job at one time and could not be reimbursed for alcohol. However he also pointed out that he was always able to get a receipt that, although it was accurate as to amount spent, listed only things that would be allowed. So apparently there is a work-around.:wink: