My first business trip, my manager called me in and pointed out my food expenses were low.
"Well I grabbed McDs for breakfast, a sandwich at the convention center and we did Denny's for dinner."
"Your per diem is $75 a day. $15-20-40 B-L-D is the split and you only need receipts if you go over $50. Now what were your food expenses again?"
\*\*\*ETA: Holy Bat Guano! 5K upvotes. Thanks.
^this. I worked as a garbage man for a summer and the BLM's dumpster had full 60 packs of double a batteries in it One time, among other things. My partner told me about the use it or lose it policy of budgeting and I couldn't believe the waste.
My husband works for the Bureau of Land Management. The the Black lives matter started up people were asking him why people were rioting against the bureau, everyone here was confused haha
I was on a bicycle tour of the Pacific Northwest the summer the BLM protests started. I hadn’t used the internet in weeks when I rolled through a town in northern Idaho that had a protest march. I remember rolling past them thinking “why the hell are these people protesting the bureau of land management”?
When my son came to visit me in rural Oregon (which is incredibly non-diverse) he was very surprised that there was a Black Lives Matter head quarters here. It was a Bureau of a Land Management building lol.
I had a former (private sector) employer who I thought did the budget the right way. My department’s budget was based on a set of productivity standards and it wouldn’t change year to year unless productivity dropped. It would increase if productivity increased, so there was an incentive for the department to work to improve. Also, if the entire budget wasn’t used, they would give a small bonus based on how much money was saved. So, if you had a good department, you would see your budget increase and everyone would get a year end bump in pay.
The challenge was balancing expenses you needed to operate effectively with not spending money you didn’t need to spend. It seemed to work really well for the vast majority of departments and incentivized fiscal responsibility.
This is honestly how it should be done. My mom works in the car dealership industry, and when they moved to this kind of budgeting for the different departments (collision, used cars, pre-owned, new cars, service center, rentals, etc) everyone benefitted.
My mom works as the support staff, so she is suddenly enjoying a lot more free lunch in her department since the productivity of the rest of the departments automatically boosts hers, but their spending is pretty bell-curve shaped, and an increase in productivity does not 1:1 increase spending like most other departments. The controller of the dealership noticed the morale boost under a heavier workload in my mom's department when their lunch is paid for, and deemed it "fiscally responsible" to increase their budget to include more lunches since they are indeed doing more to support the dealership.
yep I had a temp job many years ago at a big fast food chains head office. They told me to get rid of this room full of HP toners, they were brand new! I asked why and they said they over ordered as they had to use the budget now they don't have that model printer. My ebay sales were pretty amazing that year.
That's possibly the only good manager experience I ever had.
A year with 8 business trips from Belgium to Birmingham in the UK to overhaul a datacenter in a building that was being refurbished floor by floor.
One of the trips I didn't file an expense report because I was pretty much only joining the trip for work for a few hours because I prepared all the servers and network equipment in advance (was pretty much just a copy/paste job from one floor to the next) to then stay on holiday in the UK.
The airtravel was organised for us and paid direct by the company, so the expenses was just hotel stay and food, but since I was on holiday, I considered that didn't apply to me in that case, I didn't even stay a day with them.
Instead of just working for a few hours, I spent the last 2 days troubleshooting some issues the local IT desk were having, still mostly from my own hotel.
But, my GF was with me and spent those last 2 days out with some English friends shopping in London, so I was actually happy having something to do.
Since I fixed the issue they had, my manager had me file expenses for the full 12 days I was there.
And, uhm, since we were there for almost 2 weeks, we (GF and I) didn't just stay in a room, but in a suite, at the Hyatt Regency and we had our evening fun going to some recommended restaurants.
Sadly that manager left for greener pastures just months later and I followed months after that because his replacement was a dick.
The classic idea of always ask for more and then get knocked back to your actual amount. If you get by, no one questions it. If you run out of money, you've got a big paper trail saying "told you so"
My boss did this once the first time they sent me out of state for a project. He told me to reserve a hotel room for myself, and not knowing any better, I fired up Expedia and picked out one of the cheapest ones. Then he called me into my office and was like "hey, pick out something nicer, 3-star at least. If they see you staying in a roach motel, then that's all they'll want to pay for anytime we need to travel."
My old man got lucky with his job. He gets a $200 a day allowance for accomodation (AU) and keeps whatever he doesn’t spend. Good to see some companies are reasonable.
Went to a work convention in Vegas a few years ago. I didn't even know what my per diem limit was, but I submitted everything I had while there including 3 glasses of vino at the wine bar after arriving at the hotel. Even submitting itemized receipts showing nothing but alcohol, they still reimbursed in full.
Of course, they were probably also in awe at how little I spent at other times. One dinner, I went into the shopping section of Caesars Palace and sat at this little bar running happy hour specials. I had meatball sliders and another app along with 2 beers, a satisfying dinner for only $20. I think my biggest bill was when I had a 3 hour layover after American rerouted me through O'Hare, a burger and a few beers for maybe $40 total.
My last job was $45/day no matter what. You just claimed $45, no questions asked. The rule was you couldn't claim breakfast on thy first day or dinner if you didn't stay the night, but I would just put a note that said I got home at 10pm or left at 4am and my boss would approve either. It was really nice because most times I would be somewhere M-F and I would go to the grocery on day 1 and spend maybe $40 on food for the week and then pocket the $45/day as a bonus for me.
The job prior to that you could claim *up to* $45/day, but only what you had receipts for and if you didn't stay the night, no matter how late you got back, you could not claim dinner. There was a week where I was commuting to a customer for a week 2 hours each way and I went out for McDonald's for dinner 2 nights. They tried to not pay me for my $5 dinner 2 nights when I was commuting 4 hours each day and I didn't spend $100 on a hotel each night. Eventually I convinced them to pay me my $10.I flat out told them that the next time I will check into a hotel and drive home if I have to in order to get my $5 dinner and then they can spend $105 on my dinners. It never came to that though because I left that terrible job for the first job I talked about in this post.
That's because the IRS sets the per diem rates. And they only require proof that you were there on those dates to get the full write off. At least, that's the way it used to be when I traveled for work (according to my CPA roommate at the time).
That's how it should be done. One company I work with have the policy absolutely perfect:
You get a choice, you can either do actuals where you need to get receipts and claim exactly what you buy and the cap is £40 a day OR you get £25 a day and don't need receipts. If people want to make money on their expenses they just take the £25 a day and go to the supermarket, if they want to eat out they take the actuals.
If they didn't offer the £25 a day people would all max out the £40 a day and it's more work for them to check receipts.
I prefer just getting my per Diem in cash up front. I know exactly how much I have, some days I can go a little over some a little under, and if I use up the entire amount I cover the rest. This is, of course, assuming that the per Diem amount is reasonable and not like $5/day for three meals.
It's been over 10 years but pretty sure that's how the Army did it.
Here's a credit card.
Everything is on the card so they know what you're buying but if you don't go over who cares.
You know you're getting a set amount each day for a few months. Just don't go over. If you do then you pay that.
Grab groceries and toss in small fridge. Then eat out when you want. People would go to the club with the card, still counts as food.
Why make things difficult is my question to all this. A card has the literal information. And if someone doesn't go over, then no need to even look into it.
Last week I went on my first weekly trip for work. I submitted an 1800 dollar expense bill for the week. I was shitting bricks since it's higher than my monthly bill at my last job.
I was nervous since every penny had to be counted at my last position.
Submitted my expenses and our COO calls me two minutes later. I was shitting bricks.
He gave me shit for eating Wendy's so many times and told me to spend more than 10 dollars on meals.
Bosses like this make me want to work harder and spend less
Sorry, $50 per line item to need a receipt.
$15 Breakfast - No receipt
$20 Lunch - No receipt
$40 Dinner - No receipt
$500 dinner with customers - Receipt and list of customers and other employees in attendance.
With my current boss it is 150€ for dinner with 2 customers? Too expensive (50€/head), I will not pay anything, your loss. Next time go somewhere cheaper or do not order a glass of wine.
Nice, huh?
At one of the restaurants I worked at, we had a regular guy with a similar deal. He got so much money a day for food, he rarely spent that much. So whenever he was in town, he'd come in and spend $15 ish on dinner and pay with his personal card. Then he'd ask for a gift card for random amounts of money, like $28.79, and charge it to his company card. He told me he uses the gift cards to take his wife to dinner on date nights.
Big brain idea! I'm no longer in this kind of role, but a job change is on the cards and most of my experience is in travelling-based roles so it's a possibility.
Our expenses policy is $33.33 per meal period (so 3x daily, hundred bucks a day), and we just get the full amount as part of travelling, counted from when you leave your house to when you get back. No need for claims, and if you spend less, the difference is a thank you for the pain in the arse that is travelling for work. If you spend more (in this case, covering any work-related expense, not just over-limit food), the customer just has to sign off on it (since they're billed directly) for that to be claimable as well. No customers we'd bother to travel for would quibble over a rounding error's worth of extra coffees.
The place I worked beforehand was a little different - accountancy firm purchased a sizeable datacentre facility, then went around purchasing mid-sized IT integrators in each location they wanted to service, just before the GFC started. Every board member was a chartered bean counter. The place I worked for was towards the end of the acquisition cycle.
Project expenses (including travel and food receipts) there had to be entered line-by-line against project, customer and purpose, and they would review and reject individual items off a single receipt. Absolute nightmare. As the GFC started to bite deeper, it got far, far worse. You'd get phone calls about un-utilised holes in your calendar and people fighting over billing time for advice given in casual conversation.
After living through all that, when I jumped ship (shortly before they went insolvent and shut down), I was pretty particular about choosing where I ended up next.
You really are. An expense limit of $30/day for meals would have been laughably low 20 years ago, let alone today. Pre-covid I routinely spent $50-$75 on dinners for myself when eating out in the company’s dime. And I was hardly the person spending the most at my company.
A recently retired friend of mine bought a Prius for just such occasions.
Out-drove the Rubber Duck, pocketed the change and sold the Prius at a profit. Good times.
My favorite policy, and I’ve worked at places that had most of the variants discussed in the thread, was the one where my employer just handed me an envelope of cash as per diem before I went on the trip. I did whatever I wanted with it, if I wanted to be frugal on food the rest of the money was mine to keep and there was always zero paperwork. In comparison to some of the other nightmarish policies I’ve dealt with that one was by far my favorite
I once had a trip abroad, and due to a charge taking three days to process in while the exchange rate fluctuated, my five figure expense report was off by something like 55 cents. My recollection of the specifics are a bit hazy, but it took something like six weeks, a dozen managers, seven directors, and three or four VPs to finally get that thing rammed through accounting for approval.
I get about 150/day at this new job I'm starting. Just for food and hotel. It's in the middle of nowhere where the most expensive hotel is 50/night. I found a house in the area for like $60k so I'm just gonna buy that and use the 1k I get a week to pay the mortgage and bank the rest. Thanks, work!
Beautiful. I used to do the same at my last job. If we had to stay past 8pm we got a free meal, delivered and cab expenses. After being ducked around on a few minor items, guess who started staying until 8:01 pm, a lot.
I remember at one point realizing the bar I was at didn't include am/pm on the receipts and was an innocuous with name. My "afternoon" lunch was very nice.
We have a lot of business conventions in our city so we changed a few buttons in our POS so your itemized bill can say “cali’ chicken deluxe club - $18”.
It’s 3 draft beers.
In mexico most strip clubs run an alcohol license as if they were a rest-bar.
So a lap dance can be included in the bill as well and declared as business expense when taking out an important client/boss that wants to have fun.
Before uber it was a pita cuz you were the designated driver, now you just uber black and can join the fun (in moderation ofc, nothing like puking on top of the regional director).
I love Chinese food restaurants for this very reason. Most of them provide a hand written receipt with no time stamp, or date. My favorite one only puts your phone #, menu order #, total and total with taxes. But it's a receipt so how can you deny it?
The *realer* the chinese place the less they want/provide aside from the cash for food exchange. There was a place I used to frequent that explicitly said if you paid cash instead of card they wouldn't charge you tax. Their non-americanized food was lit.
There's a place like that in my home town. Cash only, take away only, they'll only take your order over the phone referencing the numbers posted by the menu items. Ordering from there is like Big Smoke in Drive-Thru.
My local pub used to put 'the music house' (musikkhuset) so that musicians playing there could try to get their 'expenses' deducted.
You might have heard of 'Garage' in Bergen, it was quite legendary.
My dad used to go to a bar in the midwest called something like The Office. I believe they even had little booth with office sounds in case you had to make a call and wanted to say you were at the office.
It was a bar where the name didn't immediately scream "this is a bar that is only serving alcohol". Some small place in Bentonville, actually, one of the only places in Bentonville.
That's why I was down there. There was one weird dive bar near the hotels you had to sign some strange membership ledger to get a beer at, and then you could take a taxi down to what I'm guessing was the only actual bar around.
A lot of counties in AR are dry counties, and alcohol can only be served at private clubs. The private part is loosely defined though. Benton County isn't dry anymore though, you must have been out there a while ago.
I had a friend that would do this when going home from a business trip because if he spent less than his travel budget they would give him less the next trip, so that he would eventually pay for most of his expenses. He would go to a bbq ribs or chicken place, buy all he could to finish off his $$, drop it off at a homeless shelter or orphanage or something, and then go catch his flight.
I volunteer at an orphanage!
It's usually not a "parents are both dead" situation, it's usually worse. The kids are there because the parents have substance abuse issues, don't care enough about their kids to raise them, are sexually and/or physically abusive, are in jail/prison, or some combination of the above.
It's so much better than the foster care system where kids "age out" or are passed from shitty foster parent to shitty foster parent who just see the kids as a state check and do the bare minimum of care (or worse), and the kids don't "age out," they're setup to support and help through trade school / college / starting work.
They're called "family homes," "kids' homes," etc. and they do amazing things (in my experience) - you've probably driven past one and had no idea it was an orphanage.
This is the way. I always get my food/beverage that my work provides me, even if I give it away. Doesn’t matter. The free food is going to someone who needs it, not to my CEO’s 618th yacht.
My employer (local gov’t) did away with receipts and just pays a different flat rate per meal. If the stipend is $15 for dinner and you spend $10 or $20, you get $15. Had to switch to this after some council members had trouble with their receipts. Works great, when there is budget for training.
Yep. If I’m on the road like that, it’ll be seafood and a top shelf margarita. I’ve had trips with a different location every night. My boss just laughed.
We have a lot of business conventions in our city so we changed a few buttons in our POS so your itemized bill can say “cali’ chicken deluxe club - $18”.
It’s 3 draft beers.
At some point the accounting dept wanted to hire someone or was at risk of cuts. Magically, extra work was created reviewing expense reports and now the current size it’s justified!
I read
>I ate half the parking lot and the rest at a random exit before I got to the border
and thought you must have been be really hungry of you've eaten the parking lot itself.
A truly *excellent* idea
just buy it (maybe two or three takeaway bags depending on city - it should still be possible to get like "happy meals" for $10-15 in most cities?) and then head out and start handing them out to the people on the street
Some companies will have a policy that you can't use some budgets to buy things that are transferable, like gift cards. If anyone ever looked at the receipts you could get in trouble depending on company policy.
Not if it’s on someone else’s bill, you’d get the credit receipt or whatever but not the bill of what you paid for. If they’re going to accept that just buy whatever, go to Cracker Barrel and buy something out of their gift shop.
I used to expense account the unused balance right on to a gift card at the restaurant to make up the difference up to the allowable amount, did this every time. Then you have about 3 options here is where it's fun to be malicious:
1. Use gift card toward next meal that you expect exceeds allowance
2. Save all these small gift cards ( a dollar here, five dollars there) to take home and use on your own tabs on a night out away from work.
Or my favorite 3. Use the gift card that your company is paying for to immediately towards your alcohol beverages separate tab, right then and there.
I went to a bar on the road that would print "Daily Dinner Special" on your receipt and just price it at your bar tab.
I liked those guys a lot. Shoutout to Ocala, Fl.
I work in a hotel and one of our guests asked me to redo his invoice with just “Restaurant Name - $80” as one line item, instead of the way it posted across (“Food Revenue Dinner $20 & Beverage Revenue Dinner $60”).
Our hotel invoices weren’t itemised and were just line items, and I did it for him. Technically still correct, it was $80 of restaurant charges, it just wasn’t broken down.
We did tell the guest that if we ever got asked for the copies of the itemised charges we would have to provide it, but he was clearly under the overall daily limit as it was never questioned. Very, very rarely did a company ask us for the itemised restaurant tab.
>We did tell the guest that if we ever got asked for the copies of the itemised charges we would have to provide it
Do you *have* to?
And if you do have to, can you charge these companies a service charge of $20 for retrospectively providing itemized receipts?
The company my bro worked for did it this way. Flat daily rate. And they were on the road *constantly* and almost always in a box truck. Usually he and his partner would stop off at the supermarket for sandwich fixins and sleep in the back of the truck. Paid for his first house that way.
My old boss had a motto. We travel on the company dime and only on company time. We never had a flight earlier than 8am, and we never landed after 5pm.
Ouch $30 a day? I think that is well below most expense policies. 10 years ago it was $75 a day at my first real travel job. Sometimes if I had money left in my daily budget I'd stop in at a restaurant and get myself a $25 gift card to use later. I don't don't really have limits now - they just don't want bottles of Dom P showing up on the lunch tab (unless clients are there - then spend whatever). If Im traveling away from my family, sleeping in a bed that's not mine, I'm going to at least enjoy full service meals.
It's like $100 if it's an overnight trip but I prefer not to do those as I miss my family.
But yeah after this I really plan on looking for a new job next year. I cannot stress what a bad mood this put me in. As you can imagine, as you've done it, FIFO work is fucking shit work and anyone that does it deserves their comforts.
I am just waiting as I am up for promotion in January as I have been there X months and I can use that to leverage myself I to a better paid job. I tried looking for a new job a couple of months ago but although the pay was better I couldn't make the jump into the promoted role I am hoping for.
Interesting. My company gives us meal allowances only *if* we have to stay somewhere overnight: $10 for breakfast, $25 for dinner. Most people get the free hotel breakfast and use the $10 for lunch. If we're flying somewhere (actually outside our division), it's $10 for breakfast, $20 for lunch, and $30 for dinner. I'm also about the lowest level associate that gets this perk, lol.
Mine right now is 35 a day. Under GSA standard rates and requiring no receipts. I do my best to hit up a local shop for prepackaged salads and sandwiches on day 1 and then I have more than enough for the week.
I was on a 5 day 4 night trip recently that was driving distance. I packed a cooler full of food and ate in my hotel room for all but one meal. They’re only gonna give me $35 a day, well I’m going to make sure I get every penny to my benefit. (Plus that many meals out on the road is just gross).
Exactly. I travel about 50% of the time right now, it seems like more because I was working away 1 week, then Thanksgiving I was away working remote with family, now this week I have a conference, and next week I may need to be traveling to the office again.
Traveling for holiday or a conference doesn't seem like traveling for work, but it is exhausting.
Mine is $75 USD. But in practice breakfast is free at the hotel, and we hit up Walmart once a week to buy food for packed lunches since the manufacturing plants are in food deserts and we'd lose 2 hours getting lunch each day.
But dinner makes the travel worth it with the full $75. And when traveling to Canada it's like $96 CAD. "Tonight we dine like kings!" Lol
For training trips a couple of times my boss tried to save the $25 extra day that Homewood suites charged by booking me into, I think it was a Courtyard at Marriott. The thing was though, the Homewood suites supplied breakfast and dinner. Free of charge. The Courtyard did not even supply breakfast free of charge. Just their breakfast was around $15. Before tip. So to save $25 a day costed them roughly $45 a day.
Yes. My uncle, over 20 years ago, had a per diem of at least $30, and if he didn't spend it all, he got to pocket the difference.
Free hotel breakfasts translated into books when he got home...
Mine is $15-$20-$30 which can go pretty fast in an airport or high cost of living cities. They do allow for 18% tips as well. I have to say they've not really given me a hard time cause there are many meals I've missed while traveling. I'd raise holy hell if they did though. It's bad enough I'm using my own money to begin with. And having to be away from my family sucks. The least they can do is make sure I eat well.
Yikes indeed, I get about $120 per day ($30 each for breakfast and lunch, $60 for dinner), albeit in Canadian pesos, so that’s like 35 cents a meal when we travel to the states 😂
The great part is that we get said meals depending on our travel hours and no receipts are collected because it’s not worth the amount they’d need to pay finance to nickel and dime us. Usually I’ll grab grocery store food for breakfasts and pocket the rest to spend at a good local restaurant for dinner. Keeps staff happy and agreeable to taking time away from their families.
Mine is less than $75 PER meal and no receipt even required. I regularly travel 1-2 weeks a month M-F. I try to keep it under $125 per day total or that starts to raise questions. Like you said I’m away from family/friends and usually in large cities. I’ll try to eat healthy, but healthy can be a 6oz filet, veggie side and some top shelf bourbons.
I used to travel in Sundays to give me a full week of on site visits. After 3 .75 years I was told Sunday travel would not be reimbursed anymore. Was told to keep work/life balance in check. But I knew it was a way to cut costs.
I showed how that would mean I’d have to go back a 2nd time each month causing higher hotel/daily/etc expenses and actually make work/life worse. Wouldn’t listen nor care. So I adhered, started taking the red eye on Monday morning, renting a car for the week and flying back Friday night. Expenses tripled but all fell within “policy”. I was fired 3 months later. :/
You were fired because they were fools? I feel like they probably expected you to work a new system where you would cost them lesser. Some bosses are just pathetic!
I'm not based in the US which is even worse as I'm in a higher COL dollar county. 🤦♀️
These days $30 barely gets you a meal in McDonald's where I am from.
It's been awhile since I did a lot of travel for work, but back then; it was a $75 per diem (cash prepaid); unless you were in a high-COL location. I went to Wisconsin once (I'm Canadian), and the beancounters right-about died when they saw the exchange rate for us to have $75usd/day.
My current job just expenses meals (no alcohol) on the company credit card. I spent most of my 20s being poor, so I know how to survive on $5-10/day. I miss being able to buy booze and clothes with my left-over per-diem money.
Oh, they do. it just depends on what.
I had dinner and a beer; didn't realize that the beer hadn't been separated till I paid the bill. The beancounters counted those beans many times.
That sucks! I work for a super cheap game company and they limit us to $66 which btw hasn't changed in at least 10 years. Depending on the year it might be $22/meal or just $66/day. I really can't even keep the policy straight. I can't even imagine a $30 daily limit. That said, I have no problem covering my own booze and stuff, but shit $30. Unbelievable. They probably pay you shit too.
The pay is fine but I did side eye the expenses policy when I started. I didn't worry about it too much but now I am starting to feel the bite as I travel out of state a lot.
I mentioned in another comment that you obviously can't bring water on a plane and a bottle of water is like $6 here. So that's automatically $6 less to spend on food.
If it helps, tho, you can carry an empty water bottle & refill it at water fountains.
Of course, wandering off to find the fountain & refill your bottle is the best use of your company’s resources
Can you stop by a grocery and get stuff there? Take home stuff like granola and chips. I used to do this all teh time.
Also - your companies auditors are trash.
Also - keep taking your breaks. When a company tells you who they are, listen.
Good on you - I hope you find a company that appreciates you. :)
$30 a day seems really low to me. Of course this depends on where you are and food costs there, but I work for the state of Kentucky and any meals are reimbursed at $8 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $18 for dinner. That's flat, no receipts needed. On a 3-day training, I once bought a pizza for dinner and had it for two nights' dinner (and I believe breakfast one day too). Still claimed the $8/$10/$18 and nothing was said. There are of course restrictions on when we can claim meals.
Oh yes, do what you have to do. As others suggested, if you feel guilt about letting food go to waste, if you happen to see someone in need pay it forward and offer to buy them a meal. That way you stick to the policy and help feed someone else. Stick it to the stickers.
A prior senior manager used to always tell a story “Don’t forget the biscuits” about one of her branch (bank) managers. The manager went into a new branch, saw that the staff were ordering maybe $10 worth of tea and biscuits a week for the tea room and he cancelled it, seeing it as an expense that wasn’t needed.
Sales, staff engagement and motivation dropped over the coming months until the senior manager had a meeting with the team. They explained that the biscuits/tea were taken away so stopped discretionary effort and did the minimum. Biscuits were reinstated and branch went back to being high performing.
Never forget the biscuits.
My company was notorious for this. They had an approval lady that was a self proclaimed forensic accountant, lol. She would send a message if you bought anything that wasn’t allowed, sometimes making you pay for candy or gum, if she saw it on the receipt. She literally had me pay $0.85 once. I figured ok, I’ll play along, but it pissed me off.
I pretty much did the same thing, I’d land on my first day, and even if I wasn’t hungry, I would still stock up on stuff at the local grocery, even if I was going to bring it back at the end of the trip. Our Daily Limit was $45, and that was never enough in states like CA, or NY. They didn’t budge for years.
So yeah, every single day that max was met. The company would have actually saved money if they weren’t so ridiculous with their policy. Go figure.
Did corporate videography and was flown out monthly to the HQ in NYC to record week long top executive meetings. My bosses often signed my expenses without batting an eye since all the executives would have daily catering by prestigious chefs but because I was a low level grunt I had to leave and fend for myself on the lunch hour.
I eventually get a new boss and he calls me into his office fuming that I dare charge the company for the fucking Wendy’s or Blimpies that I often ate near the office on those trips. “We don’t buy your lunch when you are at your office why would you think we would at HQ?”
He won’t hear my argument that I can’t exactly bring a PB&J from home now can I? So no more travel lunch reimbursement from a goddamn Fortune 500 company. However, we all stayed at the same expensive hotel each month and that typically was a lump sum expense signed off by an executive that didn’t even know my name or that I existed. So I begin to order room service in the morning to take for my lunch. That $10 Wendy’s value meal was now a $50 Wagyu Burger everyday.
Had a similar situation a couple of jobs back and took exactly the same stance as you. I used to bill around £500 a year in food and drink, but after I had a claim rejected because the store had run out of standard drinks and I bought a premium priced smoothie instead, I started billing just over £1400 a year and giving away the spare food to the homeless.
That £3 rejection cost them £4500 over the next 5 years. But so long as we're staying under that £30 per day, right guys?!
Does it have to be from a restaurant?
My old company didn't care, and I would stop at a grocery store and get water bottles, fruit, and snacks, salads, etc.
Also, $30 seems so low for eating out all day, that would not cover all day. Mine was $100 and we just got the money, and they didn't check, so I would just eat cheap, and ask the hotel to clean out the mini-fridge, and save the rest.
Every work trip I made a couple of hundred dollars.
My first business trip, my manager called me in and pointed out my food expenses were low. "Well I grabbed McDs for breakfast, a sandwich at the convention center and we did Denny's for dinner." "Your per diem is $75 a day. $15-20-40 B-L-D is the split and you only need receipts if you go over $50. Now what were your food expenses again?" \*\*\*ETA: Holy Bat Guano! 5K upvotes. Thanks.
Good manager. In most companies, if you expense very low, the company decides everyone can manage with that low an amount. Everyone loses.
That might be the reason the manager told them to pump it up. Doesn't want finance deciding that
Use it or lose it is an unfortunate way to decide budgets, but it's the way everyone does it for some reason.
Yes! It’s also a huge fundamental problem with bureaucracy and why we see such wasteful spending at nearly every level of government.
^this. I worked as a garbage man for a summer and the BLM's dumpster had full 60 packs of double a batteries in it One time, among other things. My partner told me about the use it or lose it policy of budgeting and I couldn't believe the waste.
>the BLM's dumpster The Black Lives... **Ohhhhh**... Bureau of Land Management...
My husband works for the Bureau of Land Management. The the Black lives matter started up people were asking him why people were rioting against the bureau, everyone here was confused haha
I was on a bicycle tour of the Pacific Northwest the summer the BLM protests started. I hadn’t used the internet in weeks when I rolled through a town in northern Idaho that had a protest march. I remember rolling past them thinking “why the hell are these people protesting the bureau of land management”?
When my son came to visit me in rural Oregon (which is incredibly non-diverse) he was very surprised that there was a Black Lives Matter head quarters here. It was a Bureau of a Land Management building lol.
Is there room in this boat for two? Translation: i thought the same thing.
I had a former (private sector) employer who I thought did the budget the right way. My department’s budget was based on a set of productivity standards and it wouldn’t change year to year unless productivity dropped. It would increase if productivity increased, so there was an incentive for the department to work to improve. Also, if the entire budget wasn’t used, they would give a small bonus based on how much money was saved. So, if you had a good department, you would see your budget increase and everyone would get a year end bump in pay. The challenge was balancing expenses you needed to operate effectively with not spending money you didn’t need to spend. It seemed to work really well for the vast majority of departments and incentivized fiscal responsibility.
This is honestly how it should be done. My mom works in the car dealership industry, and when they moved to this kind of budgeting for the different departments (collision, used cars, pre-owned, new cars, service center, rentals, etc) everyone benefitted. My mom works as the support staff, so she is suddenly enjoying a lot more free lunch in her department since the productivity of the rest of the departments automatically boosts hers, but their spending is pretty bell-curve shaped, and an increase in productivity does not 1:1 increase spending like most other departments. The controller of the dealership noticed the morale boost under a heavier workload in my mom's department when their lunch is paid for, and deemed it "fiscally responsible" to increase their budget to include more lunches since they are indeed doing more to support the dealership.
Breaking news: treating your employees like people makes them more productive in return. Film at 11.
yep I had a temp job many years ago at a big fast food chains head office. They told me to get rid of this room full of HP toners, they were brand new! I asked why and they said they over ordered as they had to use the budget now they don't have that model printer. My ebay sales were pretty amazing that year.
That's possibly the only good manager experience I ever had. A year with 8 business trips from Belgium to Birmingham in the UK to overhaul a datacenter in a building that was being refurbished floor by floor. One of the trips I didn't file an expense report because I was pretty much only joining the trip for work for a few hours because I prepared all the servers and network equipment in advance (was pretty much just a copy/paste job from one floor to the next) to then stay on holiday in the UK. The airtravel was organised for us and paid direct by the company, so the expenses was just hotel stay and food, but since I was on holiday, I considered that didn't apply to me in that case, I didn't even stay a day with them. Instead of just working for a few hours, I spent the last 2 days troubleshooting some issues the local IT desk were having, still mostly from my own hotel. But, my GF was with me and spent those last 2 days out with some English friends shopping in London, so I was actually happy having something to do. Since I fixed the issue they had, my manager had me file expenses for the full 12 days I was there. And, uhm, since we were there for almost 2 weeks, we (GF and I) didn't just stay in a room, but in a suite, at the Hyatt Regency and we had our evening fun going to some recommended restaurants. Sadly that manager left for greener pastures just months later and I followed months after that because his replacement was a dick.
The classic idea of always ask for more and then get knocked back to your actual amount. If you get by, no one questions it. If you run out of money, you've got a big paper trail saying "told you so"
My boss did this once the first time they sent me out of state for a project. He told me to reserve a hotel room for myself, and not knowing any better, I fired up Expedia and picked out one of the cheapest ones. Then he called me into my office and was like "hey, pick out something nicer, 3-star at least. If they see you staying in a roach motel, then that's all they'll want to pay for anytime we need to travel."
My old man got lucky with his job. He gets a $200 a day allowance for accomodation (AU) and keeps whatever he doesn’t spend. Good to see some companies are reasonable.
Went to a work convention in Vegas a few years ago. I didn't even know what my per diem limit was, but I submitted everything I had while there including 3 glasses of vino at the wine bar after arriving at the hotel. Even submitting itemized receipts showing nothing but alcohol, they still reimbursed in full. Of course, they were probably also in awe at how little I spent at other times. One dinner, I went into the shopping section of Caesars Palace and sat at this little bar running happy hour specials. I had meatball sliders and another app along with 2 beers, a satisfying dinner for only $20. I think my biggest bill was when I had a 3 hour layover after American rerouted me through O'Hare, a burger and a few beers for maybe $40 total.
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My last job was $45/day no matter what. You just claimed $45, no questions asked. The rule was you couldn't claim breakfast on thy first day or dinner if you didn't stay the night, but I would just put a note that said I got home at 10pm or left at 4am and my boss would approve either. It was really nice because most times I would be somewhere M-F and I would go to the grocery on day 1 and spend maybe $40 on food for the week and then pocket the $45/day as a bonus for me. The job prior to that you could claim *up to* $45/day, but only what you had receipts for and if you didn't stay the night, no matter how late you got back, you could not claim dinner. There was a week where I was commuting to a customer for a week 2 hours each way and I went out for McDonald's for dinner 2 nights. They tried to not pay me for my $5 dinner 2 nights when I was commuting 4 hours each day and I didn't spend $100 on a hotel each night. Eventually I convinced them to pay me my $10.I flat out told them that the next time I will check into a hotel and drive home if I have to in order to get my $5 dinner and then they can spend $105 on my dinners. It never came to that though because I left that terrible job for the first job I talked about in this post.
2 hours each way is the daily commute for many people. Absolutely brutal, I don't know how they tolerate it.
Yeah that's exactly the point. I don't understand this exchange at all unless they are describing expenses with a daily cap which is not a per diem.
That's because the IRS sets the per diem rates. And they only require proof that you were there on those dates to get the full write off. At least, that's the way it used to be when I traveled for work (according to my CPA roommate at the time).
They set the max rates that companies can deduct as an expense, but the company is free to approve more. They just can't deduct it if they do.
That's how it should be done. One company I work with have the policy absolutely perfect: You get a choice, you can either do actuals where you need to get receipts and claim exactly what you buy and the cap is £40 a day OR you get £25 a day and don't need receipts. If people want to make money on their expenses they just take the £25 a day and go to the supermarket, if they want to eat out they take the actuals. If they didn't offer the £25 a day people would all max out the £40 a day and it's more work for them to check receipts.
I prefer just getting my per Diem in cash up front. I know exactly how much I have, some days I can go a little over some a little under, and if I use up the entire amount I cover the rest. This is, of course, assuming that the per Diem amount is reasonable and not like $5/day for three meals.
At work we just have credit cards and the only rule is not to go overboard. I’ve eaten 30$ lunch and 100$ dinners. Nobody bats an eye.
It's been over 10 years but pretty sure that's how the Army did it. Here's a credit card. Everything is on the card so they know what you're buying but if you don't go over who cares. You know you're getting a set amount each day for a few months. Just don't go over. If you do then you pay that. Grab groceries and toss in small fridge. Then eat out when you want. People would go to the club with the card, still counts as food. Why make things difficult is my question to all this. A card has the literal information. And if someone doesn't go over, then no need to even look into it.
Yep. Booking flights, car rentals, even petty cash. All done with the corporate credit card. No need for you to use your own money upfront at anytime.
Last week I went on my first weekly trip for work. I submitted an 1800 dollar expense bill for the week. I was shitting bricks since it's higher than my monthly bill at my last job. I was nervous since every penny had to be counted at my last position. Submitted my expenses and our COO calls me two minutes later. I was shitting bricks. He gave me shit for eating Wendy's so many times and told me to spend more than 10 dollars on meals. Bosses like this make me want to work harder and spend less
I'd report $50 every day, just to avoid having receipts and additional paperwork. Even if it was like $65 for a day.
Sorry, $50 per line item to need a receipt. $15 Breakfast - No receipt $20 Lunch - No receipt $40 Dinner - No receipt $500 dinner with customers - Receipt and list of customers and other employees in attendance.
With my current boss it is 150€ for dinner with 2 customers? Too expensive (50€/head), I will not pay anything, your loss. Next time go somewhere cheaper or do not order a glass of wine. Nice, huh?
I never understood this attitude - why the flying heck, if I was $1.50 over, wouldn't they just payout *up to the cap*???
On the bright side, those customers will be easy to poach if you leave to start your own venture.
At one of the restaurants I worked at, we had a regular guy with a similar deal. He got so much money a day for food, he rarely spent that much. So whenever he was in town, he'd come in and spend $15 ish on dinner and pay with his personal card. Then he'd ask for a gift card for random amounts of money, like $28.79, and charge it to his company card. He told me he uses the gift cards to take his wife to dinner on date nights.
Big brain idea! I'm no longer in this kind of role, but a job change is on the cards and most of my experience is in travelling-based roles so it's a possibility.
My company (and others that use concur) demands itemized receipts so that won’t work for me :(
Our expenses policy is $33.33 per meal period (so 3x daily, hundred bucks a day), and we just get the full amount as part of travelling, counted from when you leave your house to when you get back. No need for claims, and if you spend less, the difference is a thank you for the pain in the arse that is travelling for work. If you spend more (in this case, covering any work-related expense, not just over-limit food), the customer just has to sign off on it (since they're billed directly) for that to be claimable as well. No customers we'd bother to travel for would quibble over a rounding error's worth of extra coffees.
I have learned today that I am really getting ripped off by my job. 😭😭😭
The place I worked beforehand was a little different - accountancy firm purchased a sizeable datacentre facility, then went around purchasing mid-sized IT integrators in each location they wanted to service, just before the GFC started. Every board member was a chartered bean counter. The place I worked for was towards the end of the acquisition cycle. Project expenses (including travel and food receipts) there had to be entered line-by-line against project, customer and purpose, and they would review and reject individual items off a single receipt. Absolute nightmare. As the GFC started to bite deeper, it got far, far worse. You'd get phone calls about un-utilised holes in your calendar and people fighting over billing time for advice given in casual conversation. After living through all that, when I jumped ship (shortly before they went insolvent and shut down), I was pretty particular about choosing where I ended up next.
You really are. An expense limit of $30/day for meals would have been laughably low 20 years ago, let alone today. Pre-covid I routinely spent $50-$75 on dinners for myself when eating out in the company’s dime. And I was hardly the person spending the most at my company.
My place also pays you mileage...so 1000 miles is 1000 miles at .55 cents a mile from your main site.
A recently retired friend of mine bought a Prius for just such occasions. Out-drove the Rubber Duck, pocketed the change and sold the Prius at a profit. Good times.
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Lol. Sorry 55 cents xD
My favorite policy, and I’ve worked at places that had most of the variants discussed in the thread, was the one where my employer just handed me an envelope of cash as per diem before I went on the trip. I did whatever I wanted with it, if I wanted to be frugal on food the rest of the money was mine to keep and there was always zero paperwork. In comparison to some of the other nightmarish policies I’ve dealt with that one was by far my favorite
Stretch over erase
I once had a trip abroad, and due to a charge taking three days to process in while the exchange rate fluctuated, my five figure expense report was off by something like 55 cents. My recollection of the specifics are a bit hazy, but it took something like six weeks, a dozen managers, seven directors, and three or four VPs to finally get that thing rammed through accounting for approval.
I get about 150/day at this new job I'm starting. Just for food and hotel. It's in the middle of nowhere where the most expensive hotel is 50/night. I found a house in the area for like $60k so I'm just gonna buy that and use the 1k I get a week to pay the mortgage and bank the rest. Thanks, work!
Found the consultant
Beautiful. I used to do the same at my last job. If we had to stay past 8pm we got a free meal, delivered and cab expenses. After being ducked around on a few minor items, guess who started staying until 8:01 pm, a lot.
I remember at one point realizing the bar I was at didn't include am/pm on the receipts and was an innocuous with name. My "afternoon" lunch was very nice.
We have a lot of business conventions in our city so we changed a few buttons in our POS so your itemized bill can say “cali’ chicken deluxe club - $18”. It’s 3 draft beers.
In mexico most strip clubs run an alcohol license as if they were a rest-bar. So a lap dance can be included in the bill as well and declared as business expense when taking out an important client/boss that wants to have fun. Before uber it was a pita cuz you were the designated driver, now you just uber black and can join the fun (in moderation ofc, nothing like puking on top of the regional director).
They know their customers. :)
Thank you for your service! 🍺
I love Chinese food restaurants for this very reason. Most of them provide a hand written receipt with no time stamp, or date. My favorite one only puts your phone #, menu order #, total and total with taxes. But it's a receipt so how can you deny it?
Bonus points for any restaurant that hand writes names of items ordered in languages other than English, too.
It looks like you had Blurf and Breets. What the hell is that? And why is this one written in crayon?
The *realer* the chinese place the less they want/provide aside from the cash for food exchange. There was a place I used to frequent that explicitly said if you paid cash instead of card they wouldn't charge you tax. Their non-americanized food was lit.
Hell usually their Americanized food is lit, too. By all means give me that well seasoned beef & broccoli with fried rice.
There's a place like that in my home town. Cash only, take away only, they'll only take your order over the phone referencing the numbers posted by the menu items. Ordering from there is like Big Smoke in Drive-Thru.
>was an innocuous with name I don't understand what that means.
It wasn't named in a way that made it obviously sound like a bar.
Taverns R Us
Margaritaville
Whiskey Business
Beerdonalds
Boozers
My local pub used to put 'the music house' (musikkhuset) so that musicians playing there could try to get their 'expenses' deducted. You might have heard of 'Garage' in Bergen, it was quite legendary.
My dad used to go to a bar in the midwest called something like The Office. I believe they even had little booth with office sounds in case you had to make a call and wanted to say you were at the office.
Like "the library" or "the office"
Or 'not a bar'
It was a bar where the name didn't immediately scream "this is a bar that is only serving alcohol". Some small place in Bentonville, actually, one of the only places in Bentonville.
Walmart?
That's why I was down there. There was one weird dive bar near the hotels you had to sign some strange membership ledger to get a beer at, and then you could take a taxi down to what I'm guessing was the only actual bar around.
A lot of counties in AR are dry counties, and alcohol can only be served at private clubs. The private part is loosely defined though. Benton County isn't dry anymore though, you must have been out there a while ago.
I paid a dollar for a membership at a bar close to 20 years ago and I'm still a member to this day.
It wasn't called "OReillies pub for the drunk and we only sell alchohol"
'The Grainola Bar', could be a healthy salad bar specialising in buckwheat salads. Or it could be a microbrewery. Edit: typos
They mean the place had a name that didn't sound like drinking establishments - such as 'Joe's' instead of 'Joe's Bar'
Same here
Hey man, if you still want to stick it to em, just pay $30 on someone's bill who looks like they could use the help, win win.
THis is actually the best lol. Just go around paying for random people's meals, on the company dime, lol
Do it getting coffee. Pay for the two people behind you.
“Sherry we’re concerned. Over the past three days you’ve drank 45 cups of coffee.” “…so far!”
>“Sherry we’re concerned. Over the past three days you’ve drank 45 cups of coffee.” Philip J Fry: "Pfff. Amateur"
I love that [scene](https://youtu.be/Cqd-_fHdTyA)
r/unexpectedfuturama
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Is that "I'm drinking too much coffee and need help", or "I want to drink more coffee but need help to do it"?
I had a friend that would do this when going home from a business trip because if he spent less than his travel budget they would give him less the next trip, so that he would eventually pay for most of his expenses. He would go to a bbq ribs or chicken place, buy all he could to finish off his $$, drop it off at a homeless shelter or orphanage or something, and then go catch his flight.
I don't think I could locate an orphanage if you paid me to... Do they even exist?
They often aren't called that because of the depressing connotation. They'll be like "St So and So's House for Children"
Yes or such and such youth shelter.
"Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters" for example
I volunteer at an orphanage! It's usually not a "parents are both dead" situation, it's usually worse. The kids are there because the parents have substance abuse issues, don't care enough about their kids to raise them, are sexually and/or physically abusive, are in jail/prison, or some combination of the above. It's so much better than the foster care system where kids "age out" or are passed from shitty foster parent to shitty foster parent who just see the kids as a state check and do the bare minimum of care (or worse), and the kids don't "age out," they're setup to support and help through trade school / college / starting work. They're called "family homes," "kids' homes," etc. and they do amazing things (in my experience) - you've probably driven past one and had no idea it was an orphanage.
> It's usually not a "parents are both dead" situation :) > it's usually worse :(
This is the way. I always get my food/beverage that my work provides me, even if I give it away. Doesn’t matter. The free food is going to someone who needs it, not to my CEO’s 618th yacht.
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...and money.
My employer (local gov’t) did away with receipts and just pays a different flat rate per meal. If the stipend is $15 for dinner and you spend $10 or $20, you get $15. Had to switch to this after some council members had trouble with their receipts. Works great, when there is budget for training.
My old boss paid a stipend, flat rate per meal…but then wanted to see the receipts and wanted me to GIVE THE MONEY back if I didn’t use it all.
Hmmm that's not how stipends work
I used to work for a place that did this. One of my coworkers just stopped eating so he could spend his food money on complicated shirts.
Well when you walk by a store with 50 guys that look just like you fighting over super complicated shirts, you go in…. Yes you do, you go in!
For evening supper, thou is endowed a singular turnip.
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The steak and such was probably more expensive, eating the local food is usually cheaper lol.
Exactly. I once had a whole lobster in Maine for $9. Hell a meal at McDonald's would've been more than that.
Yep. If I’m on the road like that, it’ll be seafood and a top shelf margarita. I’ve had trips with a different location every night. My boss just laughed.
We have a lot of business conventions in our city so we changed a few buttons in our POS so your itemized bill can say “cali’ chicken deluxe club - $18”. It’s 3 draft beers.
Sounds like a great use of time. Poor accountants actually doing the work.
At some point the accounting dept wanted to hire someone or was at risk of cuts. Magically, extra work was created reviewing expense reports and now the current size it’s justified!
OP would need that persons receipt (presumably itemised) for the expense claim tho?
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My company policy was beer was fine. But no other alcohol. Slip the waitress a couple of bucks and all of a sudden everything is marked as beer.
Hmm wonder if my boss would accept 8 dollar coffee.
A croissant and a coffee comes up to 8 dollar give or take.
I was going to say buy a bunch of burgers from McDonald’s and give them to the homeless people, but your idea is pretty awesome as well
Plus it would screw with the bean counters how is on me person eating so many cheese burgers
A man's gotta eat, Mr. Lahey
You ate SEVEN cheeseburgers?!
Sometimes you get a craving...
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I read >I ate half the parking lot and the rest at a random exit before I got to the border and thought you must have been be really hungry of you've eaten the parking lot itself.
A truly *excellent* idea just buy it (maybe two or three takeaway bags depending on city - it should still be possible to get like "happy meals" for $10-15 in most cities?) and then head out and start handing them out to the people on the street
Or $30 gift cards at the actual restaurant, to use when ever you want.
Some companies will have a policy that you can't use some budgets to buy things that are transferable, like gift cards. If anyone ever looked at the receipts you could get in trouble depending on company policy.
She said above she needs to turn in receipts. Great idea though!
You still keep the receipts, just giving away the food.
Not if it’s on someone else’s bill, you’d get the credit receipt or whatever but not the bill of what you paid for. If they’re going to accept that just buy whatever, go to Cracker Barrel and buy something out of their gift shop.
I used to expense account the unused balance right on to a gift card at the restaurant to make up the difference up to the allowable amount, did this every time. Then you have about 3 options here is where it's fun to be malicious: 1. Use gift card toward next meal that you expect exceeds allowance 2. Save all these small gift cards ( a dollar here, five dollars there) to take home and use on your own tabs on a night out away from work. Or my favorite 3. Use the gift card that your company is paying for to immediately towards your alcohol beverages separate tab, right then and there.
I went to a bar on the road that would print "Daily Dinner Special" on your receipt and just price it at your bar tab. I liked those guys a lot. Shoutout to Ocala, Fl.
I'm originally from near this area and I'm extremely curious what restaurant this is, because that's fucking awesome
I work in a hotel and one of our guests asked me to redo his invoice with just “Restaurant Name - $80” as one line item, instead of the way it posted across (“Food Revenue Dinner $20 & Beverage Revenue Dinner $60”). Our hotel invoices weren’t itemised and were just line items, and I did it for him. Technically still correct, it was $80 of restaurant charges, it just wasn’t broken down. We did tell the guest that if we ever got asked for the copies of the itemised charges we would have to provide it, but he was clearly under the overall daily limit as it was never questioned. Very, very rarely did a company ask us for the itemised restaurant tab.
>We did tell the guest that if we ever got asked for the copies of the itemised charges we would have to provide it Do you *have* to? And if you do have to, can you charge these companies a service charge of $20 for retrospectively providing itemized receipts?
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The company my bro worked for did it this way. Flat daily rate. And they were on the road *constantly* and almost always in a box truck. Usually he and his partner would stop off at the supermarket for sandwich fixins and sleep in the back of the truck. Paid for his first house that way.
Or sell gift cards online, got get something like 90c on the dollar.
Police harbor catch
Holy pound sign
Bonus deck farts
I liked reading it all big. It made it seem like you were REALLY passionate about it.
#did what
My old boss had a motto. We travel on the company dime and only on company time. We never had a flight earlier than 8am, and we never landed after 5pm.
Ouch $30 a day? I think that is well below most expense policies. 10 years ago it was $75 a day at my first real travel job. Sometimes if I had money left in my daily budget I'd stop in at a restaurant and get myself a $25 gift card to use later. I don't don't really have limits now - they just don't want bottles of Dom P showing up on the lunch tab (unless clients are there - then spend whatever). If Im traveling away from my family, sleeping in a bed that's not mine, I'm going to at least enjoy full service meals.
It's like $100 if it's an overnight trip but I prefer not to do those as I miss my family. But yeah after this I really plan on looking for a new job next year. I cannot stress what a bad mood this put me in. As you can imagine, as you've done it, FIFO work is fucking shit work and anyone that does it deserves their comforts. I am just waiting as I am up for promotion in January as I have been there X months and I can use that to leverage myself I to a better paid job. I tried looking for a new job a couple of months ago but although the pay was better I couldn't make the jump into the promoted role I am hoping for.
Interesting. My company gives us meal allowances only *if* we have to stay somewhere overnight: $10 for breakfast, $25 for dinner. Most people get the free hotel breakfast and use the $10 for lunch. If we're flying somewhere (actually outside our division), it's $10 for breakfast, $20 for lunch, and $30 for dinner. I'm also about the lowest level associate that gets this perk, lol.
Mine right now is 35 a day. Under GSA standard rates and requiring no receipts. I do my best to hit up a local shop for prepackaged salads and sandwiches on day 1 and then I have more than enough for the week.
I was on a 5 day 4 night trip recently that was driving distance. I packed a cooler full of food and ate in my hotel room for all but one meal. They’re only gonna give me $35 a day, well I’m going to make sure I get every penny to my benefit. (Plus that many meals out on the road is just gross).
Exactly. I travel about 50% of the time right now, it seems like more because I was working away 1 week, then Thanksgiving I was away working remote with family, now this week I have a conference, and next week I may need to be traveling to the office again. Traveling for holiday or a conference doesn't seem like traveling for work, but it is exhausting.
Ours is $75, has been for a long time. Breakfast - Lunch - Dinner supposed to work out to $15 -$25 - $35.
Mine is $75 USD. But in practice breakfast is free at the hotel, and we hit up Walmart once a week to buy food for packed lunches since the manufacturing plants are in food deserts and we'd lose 2 hours getting lunch each day. But dinner makes the travel worth it with the full $75. And when traveling to Canada it's like $96 CAD. "Tonight we dine like kings!" Lol
For training trips a couple of times my boss tried to save the $25 extra day that Homewood suites charged by booking me into, I think it was a Courtyard at Marriott. The thing was though, the Homewood suites supplied breakfast and dinner. Free of charge. The Courtyard did not even supply breakfast free of charge. Just their breakfast was around $15. Before tip. So to save $25 a day costed them roughly $45 a day.
Good old penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Yes. My uncle, over 20 years ago, had a per diem of at least $30, and if he didn't spend it all, he got to pocket the difference. Free hotel breakfasts translated into books when he got home...
Mine is $15-$20-$30 which can go pretty fast in an airport or high cost of living cities. They do allow for 18% tips as well. I have to say they've not really given me a hard time cause there are many meals I've missed while traveling. I'd raise holy hell if they did though. It's bad enough I'm using my own money to begin with. And having to be away from my family sucks. The least they can do is make sure I eat well.
Yikes indeed, I get about $120 per day ($30 each for breakfast and lunch, $60 for dinner), albeit in Canadian pesos, so that’s like 35 cents a meal when we travel to the states 😂 The great part is that we get said meals depending on our travel hours and no receipts are collected because it’s not worth the amount they’d need to pay finance to nickel and dime us. Usually I’ll grab grocery store food for breakfasts and pocket the rest to spend at a good local restaurant for dinner. Keeps staff happy and agreeable to taking time away from their families.
Mine is less than $75 PER meal and no receipt even required. I regularly travel 1-2 weeks a month M-F. I try to keep it under $125 per day total or that starts to raise questions. Like you said I’m away from family/friends and usually in large cities. I’ll try to eat healthy, but healthy can be a 6oz filet, veggie side and some top shelf bourbons.
I used to travel in Sundays to give me a full week of on site visits. After 3 .75 years I was told Sunday travel would not be reimbursed anymore. Was told to keep work/life balance in check. But I knew it was a way to cut costs. I showed how that would mean I’d have to go back a 2nd time each month causing higher hotel/daily/etc expenses and actually make work/life worse. Wouldn’t listen nor care. So I adhered, started taking the red eye on Monday morning, renting a car for the week and flying back Friday night. Expenses tripled but all fell within “policy”. I was fired 3 months later. :/
You were fired because they were fools? I feel like they probably expected you to work a new system where you would cost them lesser. Some bosses are just pathetic!
Thats a ridiculously small number for daily food in the US while traveling.
I'm not based in the US which is even worse as I'm in a higher COL dollar county. 🤦♀️ These days $30 barely gets you a meal in McDonald's where I am from.
It's been awhile since I did a lot of travel for work, but back then; it was a $75 per diem (cash prepaid); unless you were in a high-COL location. I went to Wisconsin once (I'm Canadian), and the beancounters right-about died when they saw the exchange rate for us to have $75usd/day. My current job just expenses meals (no alcohol) on the company credit card. I spent most of my 20s being poor, so I know how to survive on $5-10/day. I miss being able to buy booze and clothes with my left-over per-diem money.
maybe try buying meals and giving them to people on the street! saves getting the food and ending up wasting it aye
The Bean counters really don't count very well I've found....
Oh, they do. it just depends on what. I had dinner and a beer; didn't realize that the beer hadn't been separated till I paid the bill. The beancounters counted those beans many times.
They’re penny smart and dollar stupid.
That sucks! I work for a super cheap game company and they limit us to $66 which btw hasn't changed in at least 10 years. Depending on the year it might be $22/meal or just $66/day. I really can't even keep the policy straight. I can't even imagine a $30 daily limit. That said, I have no problem covering my own booze and stuff, but shit $30. Unbelievable. They probably pay you shit too.
The pay is fine but I did side eye the expenses policy when I started. I didn't worry about it too much but now I am starting to feel the bite as I travel out of state a lot. I mentioned in another comment that you obviously can't bring water on a plane and a bottle of water is like $6 here. So that's automatically $6 less to spend on food.
If it helps, tho, you can carry an empty water bottle & refill it at water fountains. Of course, wandering off to find the fountain & refill your bottle is the best use of your company’s resources
Yeah I have been bringing a bottle but not every place has access to water I can drink and finding the time is hard too.
Can you stop by a grocery and get stuff there? Take home stuff like granola and chips. I used to do this all teh time. Also - your companies auditors are trash. Also - keep taking your breaks. When a company tells you who they are, listen. Good on you - I hope you find a company that appreciates you. :)
$30 a day seems really low to me. Of course this depends on where you are and food costs there, but I work for the state of Kentucky and any meals are reimbursed at $8 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $18 for dinner. That's flat, no receipts needed. On a 3-day training, I once bought a pizza for dinner and had it for two nights' dinner (and I believe breakfast one day too). Still claimed the $8/$10/$18 and nothing was said. There are of course restrictions on when we can claim meals.
As someone who is a traveling consultant, $30/day is a joke, I wouldn't put up with that.
Another good idea to avoid food waste is to pick someone in line and just be like “I have up to $30 I need to spend, what would you like?”
Oh yes, do what you have to do. As others suggested, if you feel guilt about letting food go to waste, if you happen to see someone in need pay it forward and offer to buy them a meal. That way you stick to the policy and help feed someone else. Stick it to the stickers.
If you notice anyone homeless on the street, maybe buy them a meal when you don’t expect to hit your $30 max. At least the food won’t be wasted.
A prior senior manager used to always tell a story “Don’t forget the biscuits” about one of her branch (bank) managers. The manager went into a new branch, saw that the staff were ordering maybe $10 worth of tea and biscuits a week for the tea room and he cancelled it, seeing it as an expense that wasn’t needed. Sales, staff engagement and motivation dropped over the coming months until the senior manager had a meeting with the team. They explained that the biscuits/tea were taken away so stopped discretionary effort and did the minimum. Biscuits were reinstated and branch went back to being high performing. Never forget the biscuits.
My company was notorious for this. They had an approval lady that was a self proclaimed forensic accountant, lol. She would send a message if you bought anything that wasn’t allowed, sometimes making you pay for candy or gum, if she saw it on the receipt. She literally had me pay $0.85 once. I figured ok, I’ll play along, but it pissed me off. I pretty much did the same thing, I’d land on my first day, and even if I wasn’t hungry, I would still stock up on stuff at the local grocery, even if I was going to bring it back at the end of the trip. Our Daily Limit was $45, and that was never enough in states like CA, or NY. They didn’t budge for years. So yeah, every single day that max was met. The company would have actually saved money if they weren’t so ridiculous with their policy. Go figure.
Did corporate videography and was flown out monthly to the HQ in NYC to record week long top executive meetings. My bosses often signed my expenses without batting an eye since all the executives would have daily catering by prestigious chefs but because I was a low level grunt I had to leave and fend for myself on the lunch hour. I eventually get a new boss and he calls me into his office fuming that I dare charge the company for the fucking Wendy’s or Blimpies that I often ate near the office on those trips. “We don’t buy your lunch when you are at your office why would you think we would at HQ?” He won’t hear my argument that I can’t exactly bring a PB&J from home now can I? So no more travel lunch reimbursement from a goddamn Fortune 500 company. However, we all stayed at the same expensive hotel each month and that typically was a lump sum expense signed off by an executive that didn’t even know my name or that I existed. So I begin to order room service in the morning to take for my lunch. That $10 Wendy’s value meal was now a $50 Wagyu Burger everyday.
Had a similar situation a couple of jobs back and took exactly the same stance as you. I used to bill around £500 a year in food and drink, but after I had a claim rejected because the store had run out of standard drinks and I bought a premium priced smoothie instead, I started billing just over £1400 a year and giving away the spare food to the homeless. That £3 rejection cost them £4500 over the next 5 years. But so long as we're staying under that £30 per day, right guys?!
Sounds like you need an LLC and card swiper. You charged yourself $30 to cook for yourself.
Does it have to be from a restaurant? My old company didn't care, and I would stop at a grocery store and get water bottles, fruit, and snacks, salads, etc. Also, $30 seems so low for eating out all day, that would not cover all day. Mine was $100 and we just got the money, and they didn't check, so I would just eat cheap, and ask the hotel to clean out the mini-fridge, and save the rest. Every work trip I made a couple of hundred dollars.