NYT on the value of electronic receipt processing
David Barrett
and reimbursements:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/business/22road.html?_r=2&emc=eta1
Paying With Plastic to Please the Accountants
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: December 21, 2009
WHILE attending a conference in San Francisco about 10 years ago, I was
staying at a small hotel on Union Square and was too tired one night to
find a restaurant. So I went to a Walgreens on the corner and bought
some packaged rolls and a 12-ounce canned ham, which cost about $5
total, and had a ham sandwich and a Coke in my room.
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Chris Gash
Related
Frequent Flier: A Night Spent on the Tarmac, With No Complaints
(December 22, 2009)
A month later, after I filed my expense account, the boss called me up,
sounding a little alarmed.
�You can�t put a canned ham on your expense account,� he said. �It just
looks stupid. Next time, please find a restaurant and have a proper dinner.�
As expense account legends go, that�s a sorry one, but the realm of
corporate travel and entertainment expenses is rich in narrative and,
like everything else, undergoing major changes.
For one thing, as I reported here not long ago in a profile of a
hard-nosed travel manager who wondered whether employees shouldn�t be
returning frequent-flier miles to the corporation, companies are
cracking down hard on travel spending and accounting. They are also
monitoring compliance with company policies more intensely. And there is
a big push for better data retrieval, as travel managers are under
pressure to justify every expense.
To achieve this, many companies are investing in more sophisticated
software to track and evaluate even the little expenses and are asking
employees to use credit cards instead of cash whenever possible, even
for small purchases.
For some of us, incidentally, that is a benefit, because we tend to lose
track of those incidental cash outlays on the road.
Mary S. Schaeffer, who writes and lectures on the subject of accounts
payable, is one.
�When I�m traveling, I always think I�m going to write all the little
expenses down. You know, you tip the bellhop $2, you tip somebody else
$3, and it all adds up. But then you forget to report it,� said Ms.
Schaeffer, the author of �Travel and Entertainment: Best Practices�
(Wiley, 2007). Her book is a guide to corporate compliance with Internal
Revenue Service travel requirements and to better ways for companies to
compile, manage, store and retrieve data from expense accounts.
The I.R.S. is engaged in an initiative to audit tax returns of about
6,000 companies, partly to look at executive fringe benefits, including
travel-expense procedures. This takes place as companies are already
struggling to get a better handle on overall travel and entertainment
management, especially as business travel picks up in a still shaky
economic environment.
One of the biggest drives will be in managing the payment of so-called
ancillary fees, mostly fees paid to airlines that don�t often show up on
the initial airline fare receipt. According to the Transportation
Department, domestic airlines reaped $2 billion in such fees in the
third quarter, including $740 million in charges for checked bags
(double the amount in the quarter a year earlier) and $614 million (up
41 percent) in penalty fees for changed flight plans as more business
travelers flew on the cheapest discount tickets with the most restrictions.
Given the growing complications of simply evaluating an airplane bill,
nearly three-quarters of more than 300 companies informally surveyed by
the Association of Corporate Travel Executives recently said that
collecting and managing spending data was their top challenge in
business travel.
�Corporations are going after every potential saving very aggressively
and looking for more sophisticated ways of keeping track of expense
accounting,� said Jack Riepe, the group�s spokesman.
Thus the new encouragement to use debit and credit cards more widely,
even for small purchases.
�Those $4 and $5 purchases can really add up,� Ms. Schaeffer said. �And
if you�re like me when you travel, any time you pay cash, it�s basically
gone money.�
Most companies require receipts for individual travel expenses exceeding
$25, though the I.R.S. benchmark is $75. Ms. Schaeffer says you would be
surprised at the number of expense-account entries that are suspiciously
just under the limit.
�Some companies now have computer programs than can run a dump of all
the charges right under the receipt-requirement level,� she said. �So if
a name comes up showing, say, 100 meals over the last year for $24.95
each, they know something�s up. And they�re looking harder than ever at
that.�
The trend next year in travel spending is �zero tolerance for policy
abuse,� she said. With the I.R.S. looking harder at corporate travel
spending, and with companies under pressure to cut costs in general and
apply policies evenly to all employees, �some companies will fire
someone even for a $25 abuse,� she said.
E-mail: jsha...@nytimes.com