So I got called into our Chambers accounts office today with respect to expense claims made for a trip last month. They said “well see AK84, everything else is ok, but this claim for a dry cleaning bill is not”. WTF!!!
We are allowed to claim for all expenses upto and including reasonable entertainment, and people have used that to claim for theater tickets and corporate boxes at Cricket matches, something I have never done. Come on asshole, it was a week long trip and the dry cleaning was for a business suit, I had only two.
Capital idea, since how consistent and smart Chambers Admin is, they will probably be ok with that. I have a London trip in Feb, I think I’ll pop down to a Zara’s outlet and buy them out. Or better yet go to Saville Row.
Seriously if you can figure out how justifiable expenses are defined, you are the man/woman to solve the financial crises.
AK84, there is an old expense account story that you may find both funny and useful. I read it years ago, I think it was told by or about a photographer for Life magazine. He was sent on an assignment to someplace that turned out to be a lot colder than he anticipated. He bought a fur-lined coat and expensed it. Accounting denied the reimbursement request. After his next assignment, he turned in a very detailed and well-documented expense report with a note attached that said “There’s a fur-lined coat in here. Find it.”
If I were you, I would be looking for a way to get my hands on a legitimate-looking receipt for a valid-seeming expense to add to my next expense report. Be nice to a waiter, they can help.
As an accounting clerk who has been responsible for matching up receipts and expenses on many an expense account, I’m not sure what he thought he was getting away with here - most companies only pay expenses that are clearly recorded on a receipt, so he got businesses to pad his receipts to get the company to pay for his coat? That he was making extra work for the accounting clerk who was going to match amounts to receipts anyway?
I don’t know how universal it is, but my employer has always had certain cutoffs for where a receipt is required.
It kind of cuts down on having to staple together a fistful of greasy receipts from McDonald’s and the Garden State Parkway. About ten years ago, the limit for a no-receipt-required meal was $25. I could easily imagine working things out on a long trip so that the undocumented slush added up to one fur-lined coat.
Of course, he was a fool for thumbing his nose at them with the note.
These days we are simply told to use our corporate card for everything, so the charges all get matched up to stuff on our expense report. Occasional odds and ends like tolls still go through without receipts.
I don’t know either, actually - any time I’ve worked with expense reports, nothing got paid without a receipt (and I do mean NOTHING, from the president to the lowliest salesperson). I have no problem believing other companies/places have different methods of doing things, though. I guess if you don’t have to provide a receipt for under $25, you could bury the cost of the fur coat. Like you say, though, the note was a bad idea - “Just a head’s up that I’m doing something unethical/illegal.” Expense re-imbursement for everything YOU think you should be re-imbursed for is not a right.
Reminds me of when I used to travel for work. I used to go for anywhere from a week to 3 weeks, and on one particular trip I knew I would be gone for 2 full weeks and my hotel had a small fridge and microwave in my room. Instead of spending my alloted $50/day food allowance on restaurants and crap, I went to the grocery store and bought 2 weeks worth of food; breakfast stuff, sandwich stuff for lunch, things I could nuke for dinner. I think the grocery bill was maybe $80 or so including beverages. When I turned in my expense sheet, I was told I went OVER my alloted $50/day budget and that it was a problem. This despite that being the ONLY food receipt that I turned in for the entire week trip. I had a $700 budget and spent $80 of it and got in trouble. No amount of explaining made sense to the corporate idiots. People are so stupid it’s unreal.
'Bout fifteen years ago there was a fairly nasty blizzard on the East Coast, not unlike the one we just had.
At the time, I was nonexempt—paid hourly. Since I had never missed a day in years because of weather and I didn’t know if the place would be open or not, I drove in to work and was turned away at the door. I had swiped my badge by fortunate chance.
The next week, the powers that be made a stunningly buttheaded announcement: they said that all exempt employees could write off the snow day as a paid day off, while nonexempt workers would not be paid. Those of us who had come in and run our badge through the reader were paid for four hours. Everyone else was told to take a vacation day or eat the loss.
Over the next several months it was the running joke that whenever one of the maintenance guys or shipping guys had a sick day on a perfectly fine sunny day in May, the others would say “Henry’s out… Snow day.”
I’m certain that the company lost far more in morale, “snow days,” and passive-aggressive vengeance than they had saved by their class-dividing act.
That’s what my last American employer had. A particularly idiotic boss still did reject several expense reports (mine and others’), for several-weeks-long trips, on account of one (1) missing meal ticket. Mine was for $5.95, from Boston Market, and I had about a dozen $5.95 dinners from that same Boston Market I sent back the company’s expenses policy, pointing the exact page, paragraph and line which said that I didn’t need that ticket.
Sometimes the rejections make sense, sometimes someone missed an important detail (like when that same company would reject expenses because we were filing them 30 days after incurring them, having just come back from several months abroad), sometimes it’s a matter of showing who’s in control. It’s got to be a bitch of a job, picking through all that people’s piles of tickets.
I missed it!
I sent back the company’s expenses policy, pointing the exact page, paragraph and line which said that I didn’t need that ticket.