Can anyone out there say that their employer offers a straightforward way of expense reporting and reimbursement? I swear to God that employers use the most complicated systems to intentionally but subtly discourage employees from seeking reimbursement. It was so bad at Level (3) that I pretty much just gave up and ate the costs. It just wasn’t worth the 15 pages of paperwork and 20 phone calls required to get my money back none of which involved my supervisors or any type of approval. If one item was incorrectly categorized, mis-spelled or out of sequence, I had to do the entire report over and the six week clock reset. And this was with a company issued Amex (we had to pay it out of pocket and then submit for reimbursement because otherwise, every bill would be late every month).

At my newest gig, we aren’t issued credit cards but expense reimbursement is supposed to be easy since we’re so small. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I consider myself a relatively smart guy but I could not, for the life of me figure out the proper way to send an expense report via our outsourced system. The site’s validation tools kept saying that I wasn’t itemizing though my itemized totals matched my report totals. I resolved this by simply not itemizing even though it’s required for anything north of $100 (it validated however). Then I selected the “sales tax” category for the amount of sales tax I had paid. This earned my an instant dialogue box saying sales tax was not valid and not eligible for reimbursement. WTF? I wouldn’t have incurred the sales tax if I hadn’t made this purchase on behalf of my company so I don’t see how that’s correct. Someone told me that was because I didn’t itemize but as I said before, I couldn’t get the report to validate with itemization.

So I took some time out of my day to watch the site’s tour and read the instruction manual (in complete and utter disregard for my constitution). But there were no clues for my problems. I refused to call HR for help (in line with my values) since after all, I work in Engineering and am supposed to just figure out this stuff. I guess I’m eating the sales tax which ultimately becomes a tax on my pride and stubbornness.

But then I got to thinking how expense reporting has never been even remotely easy. If it’s easy for me to whip out my credit card and loan my employer money, it should be just as easy for me to recoup it.