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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

The much more easy thing is that they reimburse you only for what you charge to the company card. This is much more feasible now than it was even 10 years ago.

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Indeed, my employer provides everyone who needs to travel or expense a company card that only works when you are actively traveling and knows your spending policies, what places you're expected to be, etc.

I have had to occasionally expense something on a personal card and I had to get multiple levels of manager approval afterwards (not difficult, just explained the circumstance to them.)

This seems part of the design - make the non-card reimbursement process so painful that everyone prefers to use the corporate card.

Yeah, if I use the corporate card and stay in policy I don't have to fill out expense forms :)

How much does it cost a business to manage say 10K company cards, maybe even globally? Sounds like a huge hassle, compared to "Send us a photo of your lunch receipt each day then at the end of the month we reimburse you".

My employer contracts with a vendor that manages them. It's not expensive or difficult anymore. Even individual consumers can mint "virtual cards" with different time-based or merchant-based spending policies and limits for free, since like five years ago now. (https://www.capitalone.com/learn-grow/money-management/what-...)

> Even individual consumers can mint "virtual cards" with different spending policies (see Capital One Eno) for free.

That's something else, isn't it? Or how do you pay with those at a typical POS terminal at a random lunch place?

You can add them to Google Wallet/Apple Pay. Useful for giving a family member a limited expense card, e.g. you can set up a "let my kid buy up to $X of food on weekends" card they can add to your phone.

Huh, interesting stuff, didn't know about it. Thanks for explaining!

Any ideas why the companies in the article doesn't just do that to fight the fraud then?

Replied in thread - they probably just don't know you can do it, because companies think in highly insular ways.

Likely less than the sum of costs and losses associated with verifying photos of receipts.

My expense card has an app that uses AI to OCR your receipts, automatically fills out 95-100% of the expense form, and for most transactions auto-approves it via per diem policy rules.

You have this flipped. Expense management systems with embedded company cards are an order of magnitude easier to managed and reconcile than dealing with thousands of employees' personal expenses and payouts

If it's daily, why not just do a per diem and forget about tracking it?

Many companies are penny-pinchers and can't stand the thought of some people getting more than they actually spent. I don't know either, and couldn't stand working in such companies, but I've definitely contracted for companies like that and it seems miserable.

Costs differ by location. Formal per diems, even with some attempt to adjust, end up screwing employees who are in higher cost locations (and/or have higher standards). Which may be fine--or not.

But, to the degree that fraud becomes a real issue, it may be the simplest thing to do.

Shorting someone who is getting funds for lunch by a couple bucks is not in fact "screwing them".

Perhaps. But I also have standards for both accommodations and meals that I never pushed too hard on but may be different from those you have. If work travel is consistently costing me a lot of money, I'm going to have an issue.

Some costs can't be per diem, e.g. travel costs to a conference or meeting for a distributed team.

I basically got out before this was a requirement but, yeah, to the degree that routine employee fraud becomes a material issue, locking things down becomes a grumble, grumble thing but it's just what companies will do.

Not very much when there are products like this: https://floatfinancial.com/blog/virtual-credit-cards-canada/

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