My employers have cut everyone hours from ridiculous to minimal.

I was doing 60+hours a week, which was good but from 1st of jan i am struggling to get more than 25, only thing is they only do 20 hour contracts.

They say it is to make people more flexible, but they have recruted another 10 staff members, and the rest of us are looking at second jobs meaning were actuly less flexable.

They are also trying to tell us we arn’t aloud a second job. But to hell with that

I work in Vancouver but regularly fly to the US on business. One time I happened to be flying back from somewhere like Houston on a Friday evening and the CFO could only find flights for around $3000 but she had also found a flight to Seattle for about $800. So she asked me whether I wanted to stay in Seattle for the weekend and said my girlfriend could join me and she’d covered “the extra cost” (figuring she’d save over $2000).

So, I said yes. My girlfriend drove down from Vancouver (with border crossing, about a 4hr drive). We stayed in a nice hotel (though it was actually only about $139 per room per night), did a bit of sight-seeing and went shopping

Anyway, when I submitted my expenses claim, everything apart from the hotel costs for the two nights and my dinner expense for the Friday night was rejected. She even refused to refund the my girlfriend’s petrol expenses [never mind pay a $/mile rate] or even pay for the car parking at the hotel.

Needless to say, I was furious and even more pissed off when she justified this by saying she HAD eventually found a cheaper flight back to Vancouver which would ‘only’ have cost her $1000.
(And it pisses me off even more when we simply bill our clients for the flight costs!!)

The CFO refuses to provide a policy on expenses – all seems to be done on a whim.
They also don’t provide a company credit cards – I found out once that when they hired a car for me, they didn’t insure it – mistakenly assuming I would pay for it on my own credit card and therefore be covered on my credit card insurance…

Our lot are pretty good. I usually drive pool cars about for field visits, but on a recent trip I took my own as we were making a weekend of it. Slightly embarrassing claiming the mileage when it comes to not far off a weeks wage 😯

It seems we get reimbursed well for driving down here

Three week phone bill accounted to £350, I was told we get a £5 expense a day for calling home, not so much when you look at the cost of mobile to mobile calls from the US! Any way, long story short, I had to foot part of the bill to get the expenses claimed after much back and forth via email. The cost wasted with me messing about far surpassed that the company saved.

To be fair if I called my wife each night and still do so from abroad knowing it costs a fortune I’d consider myself to have a problem!

When I was away with work abroad you got nothing but your food allowance and basic board costs, you want to phone home you do it on your own wallet. You want to get a taxi into town for a beer, go for it, but don’t charge the business. I don’t think that’s unfair, anything more is a perk, not a right. Things like phonecalls home are personal expenses – why should joe get an extra £5 a day to call home if jim doesn’t have a family to call, can he save it up and blow it on hookers instead?

Cry me a river. Until recently I worked P/T for the local council. Drinking water had to be brought from home unless you fancied drinking from the tap in the cleaning cupboard where the toilet mops were rinsed out…

There was also a sink in the staff room but it only ran hot water. And then they found Legionnaires Disease in the pipes.

^^^ Sunderland City Council, Silksworth dry ski slope by the way. I’m not scared.

It’s it much better near the top of the tree any more ! I had a domestic flight refused as it was to go and try and seal a deal. This was on the back of about 10 other petty things. So I didn’t go and we lost circa 250k of work. The client is a friend of mine and he rather thoughtfully wrote me an email explaining that because I didn’t turn u in person they were concerned that we would not give them the attention they needed. I sent it to my CEO with the email chain from finance refusing the flight etc etc. it was the tipping point for him I think, things have massively change daily because I wrote the new expenses policy ! Every month I get sent bills for $3-$10 dollars for phon expenses, it costs me more in time to answer the blooming emails. Pathetic

a very large telecoms company simalar to vt. say no more

Worked for one company about 10 years back that gave us £50 per night dinner bed and breakfast. Lunch wasn’t included for full days on site. At this point a travel inn cost more. My weekly expenses were more than I earned and had to be signed off by a director and only paid by cheque as otherwise it would cost them money.

They also had a fixed start and end time I got a dressing down for being late in despite not getting home till 10pm one night.

Sounds like the place I used to work, up to £35 a night including food which had to be receipted and accounted for, except there was no limit on where you could stay. People would drive 50 miles each way to save £10 as you wouldn’t be allowed to spend the extra and stay closer…

I had an expenses claim refused as I bought an SD card reader, total cost about a tenner. I had already bought one 12 months earlier but was having trouble with it so bought another. Nobody informed me, they just deducted the cost from the overall claim and I had to justify the cost to one of the directors before it would be paid.

I’m just embarrassed by our new company video, you would need four hands to count the number of times they save ‘innovative’ when in actual fact our philosophy always seems to be ‘last minute, and as cheap as possible’.

They’re pretty generous with expenses though, even talking about subsidising my Canadian residency application 8)

When I was away with work abroad you got nothing but your food allowance and basic board costs, you want to phone home you do it on your own wallet. You want to get a taxi into town for a beer, go for it, but don’t charge the business. I don’t think that’s unfair, anything more is a perk, not a right. Things like phonecalls home are personal expenses – why should joe get an extra £5 a day to call home if jim doesn’t have a family to call, can he save it up and blow it on hookers instead?

Ok then. I assume you were being paid for all the hours you were away from home if you had that view. Otherwise, frankly you’re a mug and your employers were shafting you. If I’m travelling away from my home and family, working much longer hours than normal, then they either make it more palatable or I don’t go. I never understand people who don’t count all the ‘free’ hours they give their employer when travelling for work

Succinctly, joe should get money from work to call home because work means he isn’t at home. If he was, he wouldn’t need to pay for the phone call

Hours away is just balls part of the job really.
In the modern world there are enough ways to call home for free on the internet.

More recently though had a boss who travelled every week so he could play football.

I’ve got it easy at my place. We can happily book Hilton hotels, first class train, fly, 25 quid for dinner. As long as your line manager approves it, it’s approved.corporate amex makes it hassle free too

it’s approved.corporate amex makes it hassle free too

Corporate Amex used to be a way of stopping people spending as nowhere ever took it 🙂

Zokes agree

Ck not the whole world has internet.

We are entitled to 10 minutes every other night calling

No one complains as long as you dont take the piss. althought after acertain value your line manager gets asked to make you justify it . Its 200 quid a month as i found out after a long phone call due to family berevement

Reasonable taxis and fuel are accepted but any alcohol is not allowed on expenses

I’m glad to say I work for a very large German outfit, and none of the bad stuff above is familiar. I used to work for a fairly large US outfit, and ALL of the bad stuff above is familiar!

So you can imagine how please I was when I was asked to get him to repay £3 from his credit card expenses for Express boarding with Ryanair….

I was once asked to tell someone that 65p would be deducted from their next payroll as their hotel bill included a newspaper (not permitted in the expenses policy), had been paid and then spotted in an audit. I immediately placed the 65p on the Finance Directors desk and told him I would remind my team of the expenses policy. I also suggested that if he was ever so petty again I would be asking my team to make sure that every single penny they could claim they did claim (most people didn’t claim for cups of coffee during the day etc. which the policy permitted). My team must have been very diligent after that as there were never any more complaints from finance ;-).

Then I get pulled up for authorising a line manager to get his team a bottle of wine each for Xmas as a thank you and I have to repay £30 for the biscuits etc I bought for the office.

Personally I’ve never claimed any such ‘gifts’ for my team – I’ve always seen it as a better token of appreciation for it to come from my pocket. Perhaps I’m weird.

Succinctly, joe should get money from work to call home because work means he isn’t at home. If he was, he wouldn’t need to pay for the phone call

+1

Many years ago I worked pretty much every week-night away, could be just UK but mostly Europe and further afield. My Manager was always complaining about the cost of my expenses – it was obviously high because I was always away…

I manage to justify a mobile phone when the original GSM service (1993 I think) came in, as my ‘allowed’ 10 minute phone home per day worked out at about £30-50 per night in most abroad hotels, whereas using the GSM was £5.

The company policy on hotels/dinner etc was receipt value (but alcohol was limited to 1/2 bottle of wine or 2 pints – irrelevent of cost). But the policy depended on which country you were based in, as the Germans’ got a per diem (value dependent on location of the expense).

Oh, and different grades got different rates throughout the business – which use to boil my pi55 somewhat.

I do though beleive that folk who are on regular business travel should have a more generous policy than those who tavel once/twice a year – there are only so many cheap hotels you can stay in, night after night.

Reasonable taxis and fuel are accepted but any alcohol is not allowed on expenses

The company policy on hotels/dinner etc was receipt value (but alcohol was limited to 1/2 bottle of wine or 2 pints – irrelevent of cost)

i do always remember finding the places that did a receipt that said “Meals”

I work for “Rubbish Tractor Production Facility Number 1”, about 6 years ago I was sent on a course to France to learn about the new radio’s they were installing. This meant I had to pay the hotel bill (£300+) on my card and claim it back. So I put in the expenses and being the crap non profit making organization they are it takes 4 weeks to process.

After 4 weeks no expenses paid. I phone up to be told it’s due to the £6 a day old T’s & C’s (which I am entitled too) out of country living expenses I’d also put in for not being recognised by the system. So rather than just not pay me the £18 this amounted too they failed to pay the whole lot. No phone call or email to say there was a problem either. It took another 8 weeks to sort out. Did they pay my CC interest? *unts!

So for want of a nail……

For the stuff like phone calls my take on it tends to be that I knew what my job would involve when I took it, and I get well paid for it so it’s more hassle than it’s worth to faff around trying to squeeze every penny I’m entitled to out of expenses. However, the flip side is that if they start being picky about the stuff I do claim for I might start checking exactly what I could claim for but don’t.

After reading this thread I’m so glad I’m self employed.

This reminds me of when I used to work for a large IT company. They sent us down for a two-week training thing, at their own training centre – except that the training centre made us pay our own accommodation bills which we were then meant to reclaim. Of course the bills were higher than the per-night rate we were allowed to claim on expenses, so the company ended up charging us £5 per night.

Later, because they didn’t have someone able to train me in the job I was meant to be doing, they opened an unlimited account for me on the in-house publication ordering system, and told me to order any learning materials I thought I might need. Still got a basement full of £500 manuals.

I too am now very glad I work for myself – even though all expenses must be approved by ‘er indoors 🙂

ahwiles – Member

That moment when your employer boss asks you who you are is just plain embarrassing…

When I joined my previous employer, the CEO asked me if I knew who he was.

I said no, I didn’t.

He’s dead, currently… Ho hum. So it goes.

My employer used to sound like the OP’s but you would face investigation and possible disciplinary rather than just sorting it out.

I got queried about one of my expenses once. We had a £30 per day limit. I submitted receipts for a £4.99 burger and a £25 bottle of wine. The FD approved it and said it showed a geed sense of priorities. I got loads of cheeky claims through after that

It always amuses me when Tory MPs go on about how much more efficient the private sector is, they have no idea – all organisations just disappear up their own arses in stupid bureaucracy and incompetent management once they get above a certain size.

I did some work at a festival once, theoretically on expenses, but only things that there were receipts for. (try getting receipts from some random hippy running a falafel stall at 11pm) and complicated rules on what time of day breakfast lunch and dinner can be claimed, which when you’re working midday – 1 am days all go to pot. Hmph.