Okay, so why …
… if an expense has automagically flowed from our Corporate American Express system into our expense report system is that expense not considered a valid receipt for expensing purposes (i.e., I still have to send a paper receipt to them). It’s not like I can hack into the interface or something?
… if I include the freaking airline ticket receipt, and the e-mail from the travel agency showing the airline ticket cost and service fees, and the whole thing has been approved by my boss, do I also need to send the three-page itinerary (PDF) generated by the travel agency, too, for it to be considered a valid expense?
I should have been in accounting.
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Hee hee hee. Sorry about that. Hi-yo, SABRE, awaaaaay! B)
(Who was that masked woman? The Travel De-ranger!)
Our major corporate account used to require the printed itineraries, and also the printed e-ticket receipts that only the airlines would issue, but no longer. I think they now do their expensing from the emailed itineraries that sit in their online travel folders at the (ahem) Corporate Travel website. But occasionally, we get guys (its always guys) calling to say they can’t log in, and can we email them a past-date itinerary? Typically, these are infrequent travelers, not the road warrior types such as yourself.
Past-date itineraries are bad and wrong. Because they are in the past, the dates no longer appear. So we must hack together some stuff in the remarks section, and email it to the travelers. This is said to satisfy the bean-counters.
Then there was the fellow who called a while back who had a past-date itinerary that he wanted us to print and snail-mail to him, because he had no email and no fax. We’re not set up for that anymore, so I had to cobble something together out of screenshots, and then scuffle around looking for a mailing envelope of the right size and find out what code to put in the mega-souped-up postal meter to send just one (1) letter, first class.
Sheesh. I hope things get better as to your expensing process; complain about it in customer surveys and see if that results in some streamlining.
*sigh*
If I mentioned that the Expense System was actually something in my development group’s portfolio, would I have to hang my head in shame?
Actually, it’s not the system, per se, it’s the Finance group’s internal policies as to what constitutes adequate documentation that are causing me grief.
As for me — I save all my travel mail. All of it. Then Google Desktop lets me find the old itineraries again so I can forward them to the AP group so they can approve my freaking travel that is already approved twice already, dagnabbit!
[Takes deep breath, attempts to settle down.]