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Ridiculous things your company has done to reduce travel expenses

Ridiculous things your company has done to reduce travel expenses

Old Aug 24, 2012, 2:15 pm
  #61  
 
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Big Four Accounting firm: ban air travel from YYC to YEG, also ban km reimbusrment for driving. Only option to take executive coach bus. Bus took fourhours and first arrval was 10am. Resolution, most employees bussed up the night before and expensed dinner plus breakfast. Result travel expenses increased by $100 per day.

National Accounting firm: reimbursements were determined on a per meal basis, breakfast $10, Lunch 15, dinner 25. Meal amounts cannot be combined so if you didn't eat all day dinner max was still $25.

Ridiculous things my coworkers have done to reduce travel expenses:
- Share hotel room so as to be able to attend additional training courses (for a total of two weeks). Next year the training budget was cut so they could only do one week and they had to share hotel room.
- Attending meetings all day at YVR with home base YYC. Everyone gets hotel room for the night before except one consultant whose wife did not approve of overnight hotel. This consultant takes 6am flight on conference day. Result was next year we were all on the 6am flight due to budget cuts.
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 2:29 pm
  #62  
 
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Originally Posted by YEG Guy
Big Four Accounting firm: ban air travel from YYC to YEG, also ban km reimbusrment for driving. Only option to take executive coach bus. Bus took fourhours and first arrval was 10am. Resolution, most employees bussed up the night before and expensed dinner plus breakfast. Result travel expenses increased by $100 per day.

National Accounting firm: reimbursements were determined on a per meal basis, breakfast $10, Lunch 15, dinner 25. Meal amounts cannot be combined so if you didn't eat all day dinner max was still $25.

Ridiculous things my coworkers have done to reduce travel expenses:
- Share hotel room so as to be able to attend additional training courses (for a total of two weeks). Next year the training budget was cut so they could only do one week and they had to share hotel room.
- Attending meetings all day at YVR with home base YYC. Everyone gets hotel room for the night before except one consultant whose wife did not approve of overnight hotel. This consultant takes 6am flight on conference day. Result was next year we were all on the 6am flight due to budget cuts.
At a Big 4?? I worked 6 years at a big four accting firm in Vancouver..
Never a restriction in travel, and business class flight overseas.
I knew a friend who was pimped out to a client in New York.. he's eligible to fly home every weekend, OR apply the value of ticket to any ticket
So instead of flying NYC to YVR.. he took 2 weekends and flew his g/f out.
another weekend he went to bahamas, one to Barcelona, one to London..

that was the life... big fours i've found are very generous.. you must've had really bad office manager/partners..
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 2:46 pm
  #63  
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I worked at a Big Four...errr...Five and they had pretty reasonable travel policies.

We flew coach, but we had wide latitude to book our own flights, cars, and hotels. Flat per diems for meals. Allowed to fly to other cities on our allocated budget for our flight home if we chose.

I honestly can't think of any truly weird policies they had. Everybody knew a story of an idiot consultant getting fired for breaking travel policies, but it was never due to a "minor" violation. It was always something pretty big, like the guy who bought a condo when he rolled on to a 2-year project and then set up an LLC to bill himself for the "corporate apartment" that he turned in as an expense to his client. (That was late 90's...) Flipped the condo for a nice profit after he was fired, of course, and probably wound up at another Big 5 firm the next day.
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 2:59 pm
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Originally Posted by vmsea
At a Big 4?? I worked 6 years at a big four accting firm in Vancouver..
....
that was the life... big fours i've found are very generous.. you must've had really bad office manager/partners..
It was a YYC/YEG only thing. Technically it busted the firm policies, however all policies had Managing Partner override clause.

Travel policies and their application were from good to bad. Advisory policies were great, especially if you got a SOX or Transaction Services gig. Audit was generally okay unless the client had a contract clause that their travel policies and procedures must be followed. Also several audit clients had remote locations throughout North America, these projects were especially tough to work on. Tax department never left the city except on training courses. Great of the course was YVR or YYZ Downtown, but to save money a lot of courses tended to be at the airport hotels where your hotel window is a front row seat to an airshow.
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 3:22 pm
  #65  
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I worked for a large multinational agency that forced those of us who traveled to get company American Express cards at our own expense, against our own credit records. They would only reimburse air, hotel, car, restaurant, etc. expenses billed to the Amex card. Amex wanted to be paid in 30 days of course; the company took 90 days to reimburse. Some of us who were sent overseas and ran up big five-figure travel tabs had to choose between running afoul of Amex and endangering their credit profiles... or cleaning out their savings accounts to pay their travel bills while waiting for the company to cough it up.

I didn't last long there, and the company didn't last much longer.

Last edited by BearX220; Aug 24, 2012 at 4:32 pm Reason: Typo
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 4:09 pm
  #66  
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My current company is thankfully extremely sensible, but I've worked for some ridiculous ones in the past. It's mostly false economies rather than anything else.

For example, I live in a small town some way north of London, and haven't needed to own a car for years. So, when the TA books a flight where I have to leave before the trains start running, to save 50, yet the taxi fare is 150, it's a little pointless.

So is getting me to spend half an hour a week going through an itemised phone bill to separate out personal calls, when my billable rate is close to two orders of magnitude greater than the value saved.

Perhaps the most annoying was a company where we were trusted to make our own travel arrangements, but had one manager who didn't trust me at all (I later discovered this was because I was refusing to go significantly out my way to use an airline, which the TA always proposed first, that gave him some decent kickbacks - even though the policy was to use the cheapest). So he'd look up the hotel I was staying at, the car I was driving (this was in the US, so I needed one), the flights I was on, and publicly challenge me on why I was wasting so much of the company's money.

Thing was, he was rubbish at getting good rates, so the figures he was challenging me on we're completely askew - mine were always much lower than the "better" rates he was quoting me (he assumed that all of mine were full price). This came to a head when I ended up paying 3000 for a trip that would have cost over 10,000 his way. So glad I no longer work there.
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 4:14 pm
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Originally Posted by stut
So is getting me to spend half an hour a week going through an itemised phone bill to separate out personal calls, when my billable rate is close to two orders of magnitude greater than the value saved.
Exactly. When I spend an hour copying and faxing receipts, and filling in expense forms, I absolutely bill that hour to the client. I'm not gonna do that work for free - it's part of the trip as far as I'm concerned.
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Old Aug 24, 2012, 4:14 pm
  #68  
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Oh, a fun one was a blanket ban on lobster, on any meal receipt. So naturally, every last consultant took it on themselves to find ways to order lobster without it appearing in a comprehensible way on the receipt - it became a competition of sorts.

This was heard about, and some poor bean counter got tasked with poring over receipts using Babelfish to find out exactly what we'd been eating in Hungary and Slovakia.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 7:55 am
  #69  
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Originally Posted by pinniped
I'm surprised that all companies haven't by now gone to flat per diems for everything except the air, hotel, and ground transportation.
In Ireland, at least, a per diem is taxable in full on the employee (even if receipts are supplied), whereas exact expenses are tax-free. Don't know if this applies in the tax codes of any other countries.

My employer requires we use a particular portal to book railway tickets, which carries booking fees and surcharges that are higher than just about anything else, including buying at the station.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 10:10 am
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Originally Posted by pinniped
I'm surprised that all companies haven't by now gone to flat per diems for everything except the air, hotel, and ground transportation.

The company can simply point to IRS per diem rates if it doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy for setting rates considered too high or low in various cities.
[Edited by Moderator] I don't see ALL companies pointing to American laws to justify their policies.

Last edited by Ocn Vw 1K; Aug 27, 2012 at 11:00 am Reason: To avoid disruptive text per FT Rules.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 3:39 pm
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 4:16 pm
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Originally Posted by pinniped
I'm surprised that all companies haven't by now gone to flat per diems for everything except the air, hotel, and ground transportation.
Flat daily per diems sometimes don't work for a few reasons:
1. Daily rate doesn't work (too much compensation) if the employee is out for an entire month. However a daily rate does work if the employee is out for 3-5 days. The real tough balance is the 10 day to 21 day assignment. Instituting a month per diem rate is tough because employees feel slighted. Plus most employees will attempt to get around the lower rate.
2. A lot of clients will not pay high per diem rates and its very difficult to get hourly rate to compensate for no per diems.
3. Independant consultants will cut their per diem rates, making it costly to compete for large firms.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 10:34 pm
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My company is pretty reasonable. We fly in Y unless it's been negotiated beforehand (We REALLY need someone to do this Tokyo trip!). We get flat per diem. One rate for domestic, a higher rate for international. The only ridiculous policy is about rental cars. We are required to use taxis and shuttles. Rental cars require two levels of supervisor approval. The result being that we often spend far more on taxis than a rental car would cost.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 11:10 pm
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Originally Posted by medic51vrf
[conforming edit by Moderator to quoted post.] I don't see ALL companies pointing to American laws to justify their policies.
I sincerely doubt this was what the poster was suggesting.

In any case, certainly the ATO (Australia) also has per diem/reasonable allowance rates for reference purposes that many Australian business refer to, and perhaps many other countries also have the same.....

Last edited by Ocn Vw 1K; Aug 27, 2012 at 11:01 am Reason: See above note.
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Old Aug 25, 2012, 11:12 pm
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Once, long time ago, three of us were supposed to attend a meeting in Las Vegas and the company pres (who was not attending) wanted me to drive everyone there from L.A. He generously offered to pay not just for gas but also lunch/dinner along the way. What a guy! My response was pretty close to, "Yeah, that's not gonna happen." Didn't get fired or anything; guess it was just a case of "You never know if you don't ask."

My wife is a consultant and the people she deals with are quite generous/forgiving as to travel expenses. Basically, anything goes as long as it's not completely ridiculous (e.g., private jet on a route covered by one of the airlines).

Last edited by uszkanni; Aug 25, 2012 at 11:21 pm Reason: added wife
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