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by SoftTalker 1362 days ago
I work for an organization where all the accounting is digital, has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit.

It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.

2 comments

They probably find that they save money by making the process so onerous that more people don’t bother to file expense reports.
I see that you have also identified the central value proposition of Concur.
It’s true though. I recently bought a $100 thing for work, and my manager found out I paid for it myself, so told me to expense it through concur.

“You pay me enough that I can afford not to deal with Concur or our expensing process.”

I've wasted more time (and thus salary cost) using Concur than any amount of money the company is 'saving' by making me USE Concur. An asinine, idiotic, cumbersome, SLOW inefficient and often _wrong_ process to book any travel with.
Not sure about US law, but in my country it's fairly similar. The physical copy of the receipt must be kept for 7 years, but "only" for 3 years if you make a digital copy of it. It's quite a hassle if you WFH and expense things, since now you need to bring the physical receipts to the office.