A Difficult Expense Report

Yesterday I wrote about being gone for 2 weeks with one of those being a work trip. The downside of work trips is that I am required to submit an expense report with all of the receipts. For some reason, last week's travel created a very difficult expense report.

My company uses Concur to manage our expense reports. When I first started using the web-based application I would have bet money that the developers never once had to fill out an expense report as they made something simple so complex. Fortunately the software has gotten better but not painless.

The first difficulty came as I itemized the expenses for the hotel. Normally the rate is the same for every night. Last week my usual hotel decided to charge me different rates for every night of the week. They started small on Sunday night and got progressively larger. I had to carefully go through each line on the receipt. Then the total number had to match what the hotel charged my American Express Corporate card. Let's just say I didn't get it right the first time and had to go back through every day carefully to enter the right numbers.

Once I got the hotel figured out I moved onto all of the Uber charges. I had 12 different ones and they sort of all rolled together. Normally they would be in order by date and time so that the earliest rides would appear before later ones. Unfortunately that is not the way Uber charges the credit card company. I don't know why but I had several charges out of order and I had to go back through my receipts matching credit card charges with the number on a receipt. Dual monitors on my computer allowed me to view multiple receipts making them easier to match with charges.

It took way too long to get my expense report done but eventually I sorted everything out. I submitted the report not caring how long it took to get approved as I painstakingly made sure it is correct. I also never spend outside the company's accepted rules for travel. My boss is the first person to see it and immediately approved the expense report. Now it is up to our accounting department to sift through it and make sure I didn't make a mistake. They won't find any.

One thing I noticed about this trip is how much more expensive Uber has gotten in the Los Angeles area. I understand there are extra insurance requirements for the area and those costs are passed along to riders. I used to pay less than $20 to go from my hotel to the office, including a modest tip. Now the cost is more than $20 with some rides costing more than $30, depending upon traffic and surge pricing. It is almost less expensive to rent a car. The only downside is the hotel charges for parking and so Uber is still the cost-effective mode of transportation. At least for now it is.