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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

That is the crux of it.

I have a background in finance, and I think everyone is missing the problem that this is trying to solve.

People are careless when they claim expenses. They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through. They make careless mistakes like multiplying their milage by the wrong rate, because they don't see why they should have to look up the right one. Then their line manager doesn't get around to signing it off, so employee chases accounts team, and accounts team have to chase approvers. Senior people are usually worst.

The accounts team then hand to justify why they processed a claim despite x,y and z...to external auditors.

Setting an expectation that if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through is a very powerful selling point to a CFO who has to control this rubbish

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I think it's still not the problem being solved here.

To my understanding, from conversations with people on the finance side of things, the point of this game is that:

1. If you get everyone to do their own expensing; and

2. If you set up a system that's robust against mistakes made by people with no understanding of corporate finance, which is almost everyone in a given company (that's the "if you don't get it right up front, the computer won't let you through" principle you mention); and

3. If you tell everyone to use it and that it's their responsibility to be good stewards of corporate money they have the privilege of using, etc.; then...

4. ...you get to hire less people on the finance side of things.

I think it's another case of large organizations chasing legibility[0], to the detriment of everyone within. It's similar to what a lot of other office/business software does: it lets the company get rid of a class of specialist, whose salaries are clearly visible on the company books, by distributing their work more-less evenly across everyone else in the company. This, obviously, causes everyone to lose productivity, as they're being distracted with work that's outside their specialization/expertise, but that only adds up to an "unexplained" overall small productivity drop of the organization (and the frustration of most employees) and is not clearly visible in the company financials.

[0] - To borrow the term from Seeing Like a State.

Yep well described

But it turns out you can actually have good UI on the systems with good controls. At work we used to use concur and then move to expensify which is naturally easier to use even though I have had some issues with it. Before concur we were using some ridiculously terrible Oracle solution which made the concur solution look decent by comparison. Honestly it really felt like Oracle was forcing their developers to use Oracle forms the develop the application.

(edit: terrible stt)

Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card. That is an even simpler solution.

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead.

A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

This particular form of embezzlement is legal so everybody can get it out of their system.

And then you have silly rules like "company credit card expires after 9 months of no use" coupled which basically prevents people who travel rarely from following the rules.

Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US.

I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.

Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.

Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.

The blame is now even more clearly on the employees. They get the hassle of expenses because they want the kickbacks.

You still have to file the expenses even if you use the company card, at least everywhere I’ve worked.

Yes, the company needs your receipts for tax compliance.

And you can still get stiffed if you loose the receipt

Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in the red. It’s not even clear if this reward covers the theoretical cost of extending a loan to your employer (at consumer interest rates), which is what you’re doing.

This only adds up to a substantial benefit if you’re doing major international travel (carefully) or handling big-ticket hardware purchases on your card. Meals and travel is almost certainly a net loss.

People who travel a lot for work are often extremely attuned to the credit card rewards game, so getting only 1% back is unrealistic. You can eek out at least 5% back (and often much higher, depending on redemptions) on all travel expenses. So in this(extremely inexpensive, bare-bones) travel scenario it’s more like $65. With international or frequent travel, it’s not hard to arrive at a couple extra thousand dollars a year.

You can just use your personal card on the big ticket items (flight and hotel) and use the corporate card for the small ones, if you’re worried about forgetting something. And you can get 5% points for those expenses (with either airline/hotel brand loyalty cards, or something like Amex Platinum that works on any brand). If you’re traveling a lot and flying business class for work it can add up to thousands of dollars and pay for your vacations.

My credit card gives 5 miles per USD for flight bookings, between 3 and 5 miles per USD ofr hotel bookings (depending of direct or via an OTA) and 5 miles per USD for restaurant/food purchases. Now one can call a mile worth one cent or one and a half cent, whatever you want. Either way it's going to be closer to a 3-8% personal benefit rather than 1%. If you travel rather often it adds up.

> Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions.

This is a significant underestimate. Consider that the Citi Double Cash card gives unlimited 2% cash back on everything, and that a lot of other cards offer even higher rates (I've seen 5%) for individual categories.

The company doesn’t care about the non-monetary perks.

They do care about making sure they reach the volume commitment on the bulk airfare and hotel rooms they have prepaid for in order to receive a large discount.

Prepayment that only works for the airlines and hotels if they’re not simultaneously discounting this large corporate customer’s rates AND paying fringe benefits to the end user.

And since they can’t tell you to not travel, this is generally why large company CFOs have policies in place that mandate these categories of spend are done via their travel agency, which was dominated by Concur prior to the SAP acquisition.

> Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card.

I haven't experienced that, though I presume you have.

First full time job I had a biz amex. Last full time job was a biz visa. Both with my name on card and neither were mine personally. I didn't pay the cc bill.

I had to do expense reports and categorize each item.

That doesn’t make the nightmare of expense reporting go away. You just do it of the corporate card, it tracks better but is still a total pain.

On a small scale it makes sense, if you don’t have enough work to fill one employee worth of time it makes sense to distribute that work to everyone and loose efficiency. If the company is bigger than a certain size there is enough work and a specialist would do it faster and cheaper but internal accounting loves to appear more productive by cutting headcount and hiding costs through distribution.

> They claim for things they lost the receipt for and then they try and pressure some accounts clerk into forcing it through.

If you lose a receipt, or aren't given one at all, for a reimbursable expense, should your employer just tell you that you're out the money for it?

I think it's fine to have expenses software, but I'd love to have something modern and usable. I think the problem is that if you try and make that, all your customers secretly want a clunky ERP and need all the non-expenses features built.

Wouldn't a flat per diem payment make more sense then? That way you don't need the complex (and presumably pricey) expenses software, and you don't torture your employees with it when they could be doing something useful.

Depending on jurisdiction, taxes. So it is most likely not the company responsible for the "torturing"...

This.

In the US, maximum allowable per diem rates vary by location and are set by the Internal Revenue Service.

https://www.gsa.gov/perdiem

In reality you end up dealing with a flat per diem... that you have to calculate to the hour with things like crossing borders (even funnier when you have to include work authorizations in there, like with Switzerland!), and you still have expense claims, which might or might not be discounted by per diem depending on type of the claim!

Even if you have a per diem you still need to expense things, just less of them. So the system still needs to exist.

Unless your per diem is completely over the top, you'll need to expense flights, hotels, team dinners, client dinners, etc.

This would be true if they weren't employees of the same company who are wasting time on make-work nonsense when they could be doing something productive.

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