SuperCat

Almost every month I get an anxiety attack opening up my Diners Club statement. It says your account is Past Due.

After a few seconds of wondering if my check got lost, then I remember it always says that on the bill. Diners Club advertises that you have around sixty days to pay the bill, but puts this notice on after one billing cycle. I usually pay at about day 45-50 to make sure the money is there, but this annoys me.

mritchie

Out of habit I have always paid within 30 days. With this current statement I will extend it, since I ran up $7000 in reimbursables for the company, and now the finance folks are going through each entry with a microscope (literally: "Your expense report shows $30 for lunch on the 20th, but the receipt from the restaurant shows a charge of $29.81. Which is it?" Yes, I'm out to swindle the company for 19 cents. You caught me. I must have been bleary-eyed from working all that unpaid overtime.).

Beckles

I know, I don't particularly like that either, they don't seem to want to remind you that you do get 60 days to pay

I always just pay the "Past Due" amount of the most recent bill.

BBQ_Pork_Sandwich

I use as much of the 60 days as possible, ignoring the Past Due rhetoric. If reimbursed by my company in good time, I earn as much interest as I can on DC's time and the company's dime. I have also had good luck paying via CheckFree's website, so that I can pay at the last minute and not risk the USPS not delivering the check on time.

UserMark

I always call the automated information line. It tells you exactly how much is due and when, taking into account credits, etc.

Flyaway

mritchie: Why would you indicate $30 on your expense report if the actual charge is $29.81??? It's not hard to see that if you were rounding off all your charges how your company could be losing money. Also, just imagine if all the employees in your company were rounding off......

hobson

Oh come on. Rounding to the nearest dollar is perfectly reasonable. One just needs to be fair and round down as well as up.

Flyaway

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hobson:
Oh come on. Rounding to the nearest dollar is perfectly reasonable. One just needs to be fair and round down as well as up.
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hobson: This can be a nightmare for an accountant! If your company has a policy of not rounding off to the nearest dollar, then do not round off to the nearest dollar; SIMPLE!

ETOPS01

$29.81 is "$29.81," not $30.00, not $29.82, not $1.380.

Is there really any good reason to not just do it right the first time?

Flyaway

EXACTLY ETOPS01!

mritchie

I should have been more clear. My problem was not that they found a legitimate (albeit tiny) discrepancy. My problem was that this 19 cents held up a reimbursement for several thousand dollars. This forum is not the proper place for me to vent my frustrations at the arcane and counter-productive way my company handles business travel and other reimbursables.

skofarrell

mritchie,

Not wanting to "pile on", but as a former internal auditor for a Fortune 100 company, they aren't being pedantic when checking your expense report and trying to match $30 with $29.87. They're just doing their job.

Expense reports are the single largest area for witting and unwitting employee fraud in the US. You should feel good that they're checking, it means you're working for a well run company.

I could tell you stories about expense reports from my audit days that would curl the hair on your toes.

mritchie

OK, a simple aside has turned into a topic with a life of its own.

I have big problems with the way we do expenses in our company, and I saw this event as symptomatic of those problems.

We allow only actual expenses on meals, with a daily cap of $25/person/day. That is the same whether you're in Tokyo (where $25 will get you a cup of coffee) or Prague (where you'd need to eat steak three meals a day to spend $25). I've argued for a year that we should move to a per diem, like the government, to realistically reflect what is reasonable to spend in various locales.

My other argument is that to a certain extent, fraud would be less expensive than what we're currently doing. We spent $100 in labor to track down 19 cents. I don't have an MBA, but that doesn't look like a good investment to me.

afang

mritchie,
Only $25/Day???? I thought my company is stingy and we get $35/day in average cities, $45 in high priced cities e.g. San Fran,NY,Chicago.
Also, we never turn in receipts for meals except one bill is over $25, so in a way, the company never knows how much we eat per meal as long as we keep it reasonable.

I heard that the bad thing about PreDiem is that the company will not pay for your hotel stays, your prediem is yours on the road for hotel and meals, you can do whatever you want with it.

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Albert

afang

How do you use Checkfree.com? I thought Checkfree's customers are banks...