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. 

Fixing an Online Order

Back in March of this year, my wife and I decided to spend the $2300 to get her soft-top Jeep Wrangler a hard top. This required installing the wiring harness, which I did back in October with the help of YouTube. Since putting the hard top on the Jeep I have been trying to figure out if we ever paid for it. Today I discovered that we hadn't and fixed that.

When I originally ordered the parts back in March, it took several tries through an online website. The first time I tried, my credit card got declined. After that, my credit card stopped working and so I had to call my credit card company. It seems that there are a number of thieves that will place an expensive order to an auto parts company on the East coast and have it shipped to the West coast. The thieves then use the long shipping times to rip off online vendors and credit card companies. Noticing this trend, Visa listed my transaction as suspected fraud and shut off the card. I managed to get the card reinstated without too much difficulty.

While trying to purchase the hard top, I found several other online sites selling the parts I needed for even less than where I originally placed the order. One vendor took American Express and the transaction went through. A few weeks later I got an e-mail about how it would take 3 months to fabricate the hard top as it is not a part they keep in stock. I responded that I didn't mind waiting and in May the hard top with associated wiring harness arrived. We left the soft top on the Jeep for the summer and didn't worry about the hard top until the weather turned cold. The whole time I kept expecting the $2300 charge to appear on my American Express. It never did.

In October I started trying to track down if I had actually made a payment or not. I ran through my American Express statements and didn't see anything. I tried contacting the place I ordered the parts from but always seemed to try after they had closed for the day. Yesterday I finally sent them a message via their website (which didn't list a phone number). Today I got back a message saying they had cancelled my order and wouldn't be sending me a hard top. They must not have read my message closely because I already had the hard top and just wanted to pay for it.

I decided that I needed to try a different route and pulled out the paperwork from the original shipping crate. It listed the shipper along with a phone number. I called them and presented my story to a very confused secretary. She passed my call onto the boss and I recounted it yet again. For some reason he seemed amazed that someone would want to try and pay for something without the threat of legal action. He said he wanted to do some research and would call me back.

About 30 minutes later he called and explained what had happened. The original place I ordered the hard top from did not know that it had been sent. After a period of inactivity, the order was cancelled. Because of the cancellation, the shipper was responsible for eating the cost of the mistake. He then went on to politely ask me if I still wanted to pay for the parts. I told him that I did and gave him my credit card number. He continued to be amazed that someone would do all this work. I responded that there are still honest people in the world. He appreciated knowing that.

Sometimes online companies make mistakes. While we should expect these companies to fix any issues with orders, we should also do our part to as well.