Agreed, consistent procedures are to fulfill a purpose. aspects of any procedure that don’t fulfill that purpose are therefore, by definition, anal idiosyncrasies. Provide receipts? Ok. Tape or staple undersize receipts to letter-size paper? OK. Tape good, staple bad; or “yellow highlighter only” - not relevant, therefore dickish.
Therefore - must wash hands? Good. Must wash and then dry hands three times in a row using unscented soap? silly. (Especially if they use the same towel)
Yes, staple bad. Staple very bad. You have any idea what happens when you have a bunch of sheets of paper with staples driven through them in random places all filed together into one folder?
It turns into a single massive structure, and is nearly impossible to get apart without some pretty significant tearing.
Now, yellow highlighter only, that’s a bit of a preference in a slight way, though I can imagine many reasons why an accountant would prefer that. If they have different colors for different things, then if you use a highlighter color that is already used for something else, you can cause confusion. Maybe not much, but enough that when you are dealing with hundreds of receipts fro hundreds of people, it adds up. Why is that difficult to follow? Is there a reason that other color highlighters are more convenient to you?
I don’t see them as irrelevant, I see exactly why those would be prefered.
Okay, well as far as that goes, yes, I do have a procedure that an employee must follow to wash their hands, and it is not a silly idea like yours, but, using hot water, soap (yes, unscented), scrubbing under fingernails, spending at least 20 seconds (sing happy birthday, that’s almost exactly 20 seconds) and thoroughly drying with a fresh towel may seem silly to someone who is not as concerned about food safety as I am.
If they feel that 10 seconds is good enough, and their hands aren’t really all that dirty, so they don’t need soap, they prefer to use lukewarm water, and why should they have to dry their hands, should I let them use their own standards of “cleanliness”?
I think the “yellow highlighter, no other color” thing is because some copy machines don’t pick up other colors properly, so a copy shows up blacked out (like old wartime censorship) defeating the purpose.
Those receipts with a pink or blue streak down the middle near the end of the roll must drive some accountants crazy, then… Not to mention places like Costco that stroke off their receipts with marker when you leave the store.
I’ve never had a problem with staples in folders.
I worked for a US bank in the mid-90s, and we had a similar requirement, though I think it was only one week. It was explained to me as being designed to spot fraud/embezzling.
It was a little frustrating when I moved from data processing to tech support because my supervisor kept denying vacation requests on various user-needs grounds. Then the end of December came, and he acted like I had screwed him over by taking off the week between Christmas and New Years. It just became my regular week off for the rest of that job.
To this day, I prefer to take off a week or two in January if I can.
You bring up another good reason why an accountant wouldn’t want you to use a highlighter that is the same color as the end of roll markers on receipts, as they may miss your highlight, whether it be obscured by the same color streak, or that they are just used to ignoring that color on a receipt, due to it being common that those colors are on a receipt and are irrelevant.
When you are going over thousands of receipts, it is actually useful to have them done consistently. Sure, it’ll only take the accountant a few more seconds to figure out what you are doing with it, but that’s a few extra seconds for every receipt.
Even if it only costs the accountant another 2 seconds per receipt that is marked with incorrect colors, that can be compared to the amount of time it costs you to use the proper colored highlighter, which is zero seconds.
Why exactly do you feel that using a different colored highlighter is necessary? What does it benefit you over using the color that your employers have asked you to use?
Then count yourself lucky. Not sure why your experience should be greater than those who have. Staples do have metal prongs that catch onto other papers, they catch onto each other, they even go through one sheet of paper into another, sandwiching them together. They also take up more space in a file, they are a higher chance of cuts or abrasions (when you are dealing with thousands of them, minor chances add up). I also do not see how using staples is more convenient than tape to do on your end.
I’ve been an accountant who asked for receipts.
Four main reasons :
I don’t want to have to prove to the IRS guy or auditor that you indeed spent $ 29.95 on a widget for the company without a receipt. If I don’t ask for the receipt, be sure that he will.
My boss (who is also your boss), in good part because of reason 1) above wants me to only reimburse expenses if provided with a receipt. If I don’t, and there’s some problem down the line, you might or might not end up in trouble, but I sure will.
3)You not being able to figure out how you could cheat the company out of money given all the “proofs” you provided doesn’t mean that another more imaginative employee won’t. Trying to cheat on expenses is a major pass time in all companies, even for ridiculously low amounts. And people will try anything in the pursuit of this worthy goal. You’re probably an honest man underestimating the very probable dishonesty of many of your coworkers.
4)If I give you a break, next week your coworker Jennifer will ask me why I’m not reimbursing her the $ 200 she spent simply because she lost the receipt and also the widget (and she paid in cash, so no card statement, either), since after all I did exactly that for you. After two months, half of employees won’t bother anymore to ask for or keep a receipt, and will expect to be reimbursed nevertheless. If you give someone a break (or accept to do anything that they are supposed to do because it would be simpler to do it yourself than to insist on them doing it), you can safely assume that all the employees will be somehow aware that you did within about 5 minutes, and that they’ll all expect to be given the same break every time. And of course, if denied, they’ll question the reasons of your favoritism.
I strongly doubt that you’ll be able to tell apart procedures that serve a purpose and procedures that don’t (or used to but don’t anymore). It might be that they serve a purpose that the accountant himself is unaware of. I remember an instance where someone had found a shortcut that didn’t follow the established procedure. Since we couldn’t ourselves see the point of this procedure, and it seemed a waste of time, we let her do it this way. Until, at the end of the year, we received a phone call from another accountancy department, who had been trying for two months to explain a discrepancy and finally had traced it to us. They were fed by the same system, and the procedure, useless for us, was necessary for them. Everybody involved had to redo everything since the beginning of the year by hand, and we had to apologize profusely for the waste of time. Fortunately only this one woman had figured out the shortcut ans used it.
Of course, this kind of situations isn’t limited to accountancy, and of course too, there are indeed useless procedures. But, once again, I strongly doubt that a casual outside observer can make a valid guess at which procedures serve a purpose and which don’t.
And finally note also that the person who requires you to follow the procedure might even not be willing to tell you why it exists in the first place, either because explaining it to you will take time and he has other things to do (especially since he might expect out of experience that any explanation will start new arguments), or because this procedure exists to counter a known risk, and he doesn’t want to give you bad ideas. Answering “that’s the procedure, sorry” is much simpler.
Never seen a strip club bill, but I’ve seen an expense bill presented for “Thaï massage”. I’m not sure what exactly the Thaï massage included, but even the most ordinary massage was definitely not considered a business expense.
In my experience, an auditor will pick random samples to conduct a more thorough verification on them. So, he will just have a general look at some things, will ask to see every receipt simply to ascertain they exist for some other things, and will verify them in detail for yet some others. So, if there’s a couple instances of something fishy with your counts, he’ll likely not notice, but then again, he might. And if he notices one thing that is aloof, you’re of course in for a thorough examination of everything else.
After reading this, I assume that my previous statement about random samples is incorrect. Or is no longer correct since I was doing this job long ago. Or might or might not be correct depending on where.
Yes. A lot of audit processes that were random 15 years ago (or even 5 years ago) are not any more.
But there is some probability that ANY transaction can be scrutinized.
That’s the point - the accountant wouldn’t *see *a credit card bill that had a $29.95 entry for “Port o’ Call” - the credit card bill will have some other name, perhaps a corporate name like “M&N Corp”. That’s the name the accountant will see. Lots of establishments bill under corporate names, so “M&N Corp” could actually be a widget seller or an ordinary restaurant.
After our MP’s expenses scandal, where they seemed to be able to claim for the most extraordinary things, yet still wanted more (our local MP claimed for the rental when her husband watched porn on cable), I wondered if there are any restrictions/scandals on American politicians expenses.
That’s weird. This was a large corporation with government contracts. I was a direct employee, traveling for work. I had a per diem for meals, and got reimbursed for everything else - airline ticket, gas and tolls, etc. They gave it to me in my paycheck, and took out withholding because it was a paycheck. Didn’t make sense to me, but was told that was IRS rules, because it was “income” to me.
They were wrong - if their plan required you to substantiate expenses with a receipt and only reimbursed you for allowable expenses , it was absolutely not income to you. I have no idea what the motivation would be because it actually cost your company money to do it that way.
I’m thinking that there was withholding taken out, just not covering the reimbursements, and he has not done the math to separate them out.
Either that, or his employer was either incompetent, or for some reasons wanted to pay more money in taxes in order to force their employee to pay more money in taxes.
I was a caterer, and I got a stipend from my employer to subsidize having a cell phone of $10 a paycheck. I did not pay taxes on that $10.
My employer allows certain employees a $1000/month stipend to use their personal car without having an accountable plan. It’s taxable. Employees can theoretically opt for an accountable plan, but only the ones who can log 20,000 business miles a year find it worthwhile. The break-even is probably 12,000 miles, but the hassle isn’t worth it. You have to log each trip and purpose, deduct your normal commuting distance.
Another much larger group gets a stipend for allowing the company to put security software on the employees’ cell phones so that they can get access to email, calendar and some other data. It’s taxable too.
It’s possible - it was 20 years ago, so my memory could be faulty.
I think it was Gilbreth, as explained by one of his children in Cheaper By The Dozen, who showed that the quickest way to get compliance with a procedure that seemed odd was to explain why it was necessary. “When the shovel blade has worn down to half it’s size, cut the handle in half and throw it away. You can shovel enough extra to pay for the new shovel in 4 hours.”
As for calling expenses income - I suspect the employer was too lazy to set up a separate reimbursement system, so they just added reimbursement amount to the paycheque, and the payroll program counted it as income.