Now I'd like to think that my former employer didn't think this of us, but if you think about it, it begins to cost so much to deal with the paperwork. We weren't exactly cheap employees and did our expenses on work time. For me to deal with the expenses from an average 5 day, week long trip, all in, was probably $60-80 payroll in labor, between entering it all into Concur, organizing receipts (because they wanted the hard copies too), taking screenshots of the credit card activity (because F us), and then circling back with my admin when she inevitably didn't understand something or screwed it up (50/50 chance at what it was, but was always something).

And that's excluding the time of the folks in accounts payable who had to review it all.

That's also subject to client rules - if the engagement letter says you are flying economy, you usually are (we had some senior folk who would convince management they should be in business / first, but the company had to eat that cost, as it couldn't be charged back. Anyone lower than a senior manager was in the back of the bus for certain major client stints!)

My biggest issues were:
a) Time of flight - certain destinations they would try to book your travel starting or finishing at absurd times that would eat into your productivity. Scheduling me on a flight at 2pm is just stupid where there are either 8am or 6pm options (depending on if I am coming or going). 2pm just means the travel eats pretty much the whole day unnecessarily. I was frequently 'out of policy' because I took slightly more expensive flights that let me spend the day working, either at home or at the destination.
b) Silly cross-city connections - London came up a few times, into Heathrow (because AC were a preferred airline it would try to select AC or codeshare flight as default) but then Gatwick or once even Stanstead to connect to another European city, but also had people having to change airports in Chicago and New York.
c) Hotels that simply made no sense in relation to where you had to be - there was one city where there was a metro line pretty much door to door hotel to office, but because of the slightly higher hotel cost it was 'out of policy'. The fact the difference in cost was far less than a taxi there and back, and that hotel gave you breakfast when the in policy one did not, eluded them.

All the sign of poor leadership and worse management. If it costs $70 for the submitter to prepare the reimbursement request and even half of that to review it and process it for payment, that is roughly $100.

If you go through all of that to catch somebody who had an extra vodka with their dinner, you haven't saved particularly much.

This is also why many businesses have shifted to a per diem system and do not require receipts for the items covered by the per diem. So long as the per diem is fair, most employees tend to like it because it lets them shift things around to their eating habits.

This, of course, does not work for people who have business development responsibilities as their expenses are both unpredictable and possibly ought to be high end.

Wow. I did not know that. Thanks for this.

Would you say it's pretty common for E&Y folks to be in the front of the plane though?

E&Y seems like a pretty good place to work? Stodgy in some respects?

Easy solution at my last employer. Per diems were split into meals to allow partial claim on travel days. Business development people would just substitute a meal with receipt and include prospect/client details. (deducting that meal's per diem allowance).

Certain circumstances also resulted in similar partial per diems reductions such as a team dinner.

I can't speak for E&Y but at my Big 4 the only people at the front of the plane were people who got CPUd due to status, generally these were partners and senior managers just because they travelled more. Once I shared a cab to the office with one of the Directors on my project, she was a 1K and I was Gold at the time, we were both delayed out of BOS and she could have gotten on an earlier flight and got to the office on time but said no because her CPU cleared into the later flight. I sat in E+ for that one. Domestic first wasn't allowed, for most purposes. The only exception I knew of is if you absolutely had to be somewhere at a certain time and there wasn't an economy fare available. Even then it was flagged as an out of policy booking and you can almost guarantee central finance would be emailing you about why you booked it, so you'd need manager approval for it. I mean they once hassled me over a cancellable hotel reservation because it was $20 more than the primary hotel we were supposed to use.

So I did what any respectable FTer would do. I cancelled the booking, waited for the preferred hotel to be sold out, and rebooked the hotel I wanted which while it was the same price as the original reservation, was no longer out of policy because the preferred hotel wasn't available. What a PITA.

Our policy for J travel is 9 hours total gate-to-gate including the connections.

Since we're based in the Midwest, that means Europe and South America are almost always fair game, but all continental North America is Y. Personally, I find that reasonable...putting myself in my clients' shoes, a J/F ticket on a midcon would be kind of a waste of money. We all know it isn't a great experience for the traveler.

We still do receipts for meals with suggested caps by city. I much preferred the fixed per diems where you don't turn in meal receipts at all. The "suggested" cap means nobody gives me grief for being $10 over one day, but I'd still rather not have to deal with the receipts. I'd happily go quite frugal on most meals, as I generally enjoy casual cafes, streetfood, farmer's markets, etc.

We are permitted to Uber/Lyft but not permitted to Airbnb. That makes sense to me. Our general hotel guidance is the standard midrange Marriott/Renaissance/Westin/Hilton/etc. level, although if you go up or down a level from there with good reason and a decent rate, nobody minds.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread.
This is pretty similar to ours. I think it's probably below average in terms of leeway, but do you think this level of meal allowance is fairly common?
Since I almost exclusively stay at Hilton where my status gets me free breakfast, breakfast's a non-issue.
But I'm often having to go over limit for lunch and pay a few bucks out of pocket.

After your $100 day, Panda Express for dinner the next 2 nights lol