I’ve had the same happen to me. Took some clients out for a round of golf and they insisted on going to Hooters afterwards. The receipt I turned in with my expense report showed all of the food we ordered and four pitchers of “iced tea.” Never had it questioned.
Is that what they call lap dances these days?
I’ve had various company cards for ages, and none of them showed that level of detail. If you were charging at a bar that’s one thing. Or does it show up on the receipt? (The credit card receipts I get don’t show this, and that is all we have to turn in.)
Now we’re allowed alcohol, so maybe your card has an Izzy and Moe snitch feature.
That’s great for some situations, but not so hot if you want a decent meal and are in a high cost area - or are in a hotel during a snowstorm and don’t want to trudge down the street.
Not so much for food, but for hotels big companies have contracts, and keeping track of the spend with the hotel helps negotiate better rates. One advantage of eating in a hotel dining room is that if you charge your meal to your room it shows up on your hotel bill, so only one thing to scan. We book air travel through our corporate travel office, and that never even shows up.
These days I only go to conferences where I go to enough meetings and parties with food so I never actually have to pay for any.
Back in 1980 when I started in the Bell System we did not have a corporate card, and you were not allowed to use a personal card, so you got a cash advance for everything. Airfare and rental cars were direct bills, but hotels were a pain.
Thus one response from the Bell Labs fortune(1) UNIX command: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a cash advance from Sam.”
When I was travelling for Accenture, they gave me a company card for plane, car & hotel rental. They also gave me a choice of per diem: $25 a day if I rented a room without a kitchen, or $35 a day if I rented one with a kitchen. I rented rooms with a kitchen and ate at Wendy’s.
In Australia it’s about fringe benefits tax plus making sure people don’t steal or overspend.
Back in the old days, when mountains were in beta I had to travel for work. I started by copying a ream of expense paperwork - I made forms that had headings of name, the specific trip I was on then blanks for the information the bean counters needed and tossed them into a briefcase with a couple of things of double sticky tape. As I got a receipt I would fill in the formlet, tape the receipt to the paper and put it on the bottom of the stack of blank forms. When I got home, they were all there and ready to play fill in the blanks on the company official bean counter form. Then I just handed in the whole stack and let them deal with it.
I never worried about drinking, because in general I didn’t drink - a single female trying to get a drink in a hotel bar is fair game for sexual assault. I can’t tell you the number of times I got groped while just sitting alone in a bar/restaurant in a hotel.
Sheesh, I work for a global fortune 50. We have to have receipts when my individual meals exceed $70/day (entertainment is separate). One of the corporate bigwigs explained at a customer meeting that after doing itemized expenses and keeping receipts, the IRS finally explained for under $70, you don’t need any of this. Anyhoo, that’s what we do. I still have to fill out a form and say breakfast, denny’s $15, lunch sushi joe’s $25, dinner room service $30 and good to go.
When I worked at Lehman Brothers for a year in 1996, I never once filled out an expense form. Just put it on the corporate Amex and that was it. Seriously, business trip to NY for 2 weeks. Nothing. And the corporate Amex meant it was Lehman’s and not me as the responsible party…
Can you verify whether the receipt requirement threshold is $5 or $25? That would seem to streamline the process significantly if employers knew that.
90 bucks a day is sufficient.
You all still have to send in copies of the receipts? My company card imports my charges into tracking software. All I have to do is pick a category for each charge, and add a list of anyone else involved. Easy.
I get a per diem equal to the federal government rate - which ranges from $46 to $71 dollars per day. Even in Manhattan ($71), that’s enough for decent meals- possibly not enough for room service, but certainly enough for delivery.
Its control, pure and simple. The minute that they can get you to buy that stupidity has the right to manage intelligence with a straight face, you’re DONE.
It’s $75. (ETA: I suppose I should provide a cite.
Yes, my company requires receipts for anything over $75, but they want receipts for everything, if you have them. But they won’t cause much of a ruckus if you forget to get one for the six bucks you spent at Burger King.
wut
As long as you have the right cover sheet for the form.
Withdrawn.
Note to self: never post in a business thread after interacting with [del]micro-[/del]management.
Yeah, well…I guess you never managed a sales department. 
Seriously though, much of expense reporting is about “control”. That’s why they call the person who exerts oversight over use of company funds a “controller”. It’s to control that you don’t spend company money on shit you ain’t supposed to. Like this guy.
You think filling out the expense reports is a PITA. Try managing multiple teams of traveling consultants, each with different clients with different expense policies. Per diem vs actuals. Billable vs nonbillable. Receipts mandatory vs mandatory above some cutoff. Personal card vs corporate. Exchange rates.
Plus all the inane questions I get…
“No, you can’t expense your long distance calls to the client because the company already reimburses your personal phone.”
“I don’t know if you can expense your Metrocard between the office and a client in Midtown because it’s never come up because everyone here has an unlimited Metrocard makes over $100 k a year so they don’t sweat a $2.50 subway trip”
Managing timesheets and expenses is my least favorite part of my job.
There’s no single threshold set by the IRS - the threshold depends on the activity.
For travel out of town, for example, companies are allowed to reimburse at a per diem rate rather than actual expenses. This is where the $25/$75 idea comes from - since these are both lower than the typical per diem rates ($170 or $250 depending on locality right now), the companies choose the limit they’re willing to give employees. Companies set the limit lower than the IRS requirement because they don’t want employees staying at Motel 6 and asking for reimbursement for the Hilton. (Or the equivalent for food). With travel expenses, the most important element to substantiate is the business purpose of the travel.
But entertainment and gifts both require direct documentation of the cost (and some other information as well). There’s no threshold allowed there.