[pjc50]

I used to work for a small consultancy which had a fantastic policy on this: there was a company credit card, and you could buy anything on it up to £100 with no advance approval - provided you made sure to send a reconciliation entry with a project code in before the end of the month, so it could be billed to the customer.

This was incredibly timesaving for all those cases where you need a cable or a USB stick or a book or some parts off Digikey or a small software license. Because having a meeting about whether or not something is necessary would easily have consumed more than £100 of time.

It helped that it was a small office of less than ten people and everyone could physically see everyone else's desk.