Originally Posted by
1StRanger
Or, have an ATM card that eats up all ATM fees (refunding those from the ATM itself), e.g. a card from Charles Schwab Bank.
I used to have USAA which did that, too, but unfortunately for a specific reason I now bank with a bank that does not do this. I do have a couple other accounts which I sometimes use to avoid fees, but it requires more work ahead of time than I usually can do. But for my laziness yours is good advice.
Originally Posted by
1StRanger
But for those employed by state and federal agencies, restaurant charges on the hotel bill complicates the accounting for the business department (they must go into separate categories). Not to mention that the alcohol charges are not reimbursed, and such employers strongly encourage to have a separate bill for the alcohol even at a restaurant. And if your employer is using Concur, - you cannot link one receipt to two different charges, so you have to upload to different copies of that receipt. (At least that was still the case 2-3 years ago.) It's much easier to have a separate restaurant receipt for the food.
Did not know this. I used to work for a large company that required you keep all receipts, tape them to paper, write out certain parts of the receipt on the paper, scan the receipts and create you expense report from scratch, entering many data fields for each expense. You were responsible for the charges personally and got a reimbursement check. There was tons of checking and rechecking to make sure you didn't personally eat any expenses. I then moved to another large company (these are two of the biggest companies on the planet) where the charges went directly to the company. All you had to do was pull up the charges, check each one as yours and click submit. The only receipts required were for hotels and you did have to separate the charges within the bill so that meals could be taxed at the different rate. People at the second company would complain about how hard expense reports were, having no idea about the arts and crafts project we had at the first company.