Miasmatic Review

But its quicker and easier!

Sometimes I swear my company does stuff just to make the employee’s lives difficult. At the beginning of September, we switched to an electronic/online system for reimbursement of work related expenses. This covers things like travel, conferences, client meetings, etc. The old system all you had to do was fill out a form, attach your receipts and give to your manager for signing. Then the manager would send it to the reimbursement department. In about 2-3 weeks, you would get a check for the amount submitted. It was relatively easy to use and you had a definite period for reimbursement.

This new system has complicated the process to the point of annoyance. Now you have to go online through their very user-unfriendly system called Concur. Then you have to create an expense report AND an itinerary if you traveled. If you used your company card, you need to wait until the expenses show up in the system before you can put in for reimbursement. Once gone through all that, adding each line and correcting all the mistakes that the auto transfer system makes you can “submit” it. What they mean is that it sends an electronic signature to your manager, and then it prints a copy for you to fax to another office.

Putting it like that makes it sound not so bad, IF IT WORKED! I went to Texas October 17 through the 21st. I paid for EVERYTHING with my corporate card. The items never showed up in Concur like they where supposed to. Every time I asked someone about it, they told me, just wait it can take some time. So I waited and checked every couple of days. Yesterday I received a Bill from the Corp Card company wanting payment. When I came into work today, my charges STILL were not showing. To say I was irritated would be an understatement. When I contacted the help department, I received the same song and dance. This time however I refused to listen to them and explained; It’s been over 2 weeks and nothing has showed up, yet I have a bill to pay the card. Now someone says, well it must not have transferred, lets look at it. Sure enough, it didn’t transfer properly and I have to manually transfer the charges.

Then when we first switched to this system, I was told that if you paid on your corporate card, you don’t need receipts. The system will accept what is received from the card company as proof of payment. Okay! That makes sense; they already have the charges on the card and can see from where the charge originated. Why would they need another receipt? Well once again, I was misled. Nope, if you have purchases for meals or taxi/limos/car services you still need a receipt. Now, it is looking like I’m going to be stuck with paying close to $100.00 out of my pocket, because I don’t have those receipts. I had them when I came back from my trip, but was told, “You don’t need them”. To the best of my memory, I believe I threw them out. That was AFTER I was told I didn’t need them because I used my corporate card!

Everyone that I have talked to that uses this new system hates it. They all have the same complaints and have run across the same problems, including the receipt issue. One person I talked to is still waiting for reimbursement from a trip they took back in September!

Under the old system, I would have submitted my form the day I returned and would have received payment by this Friday at the latest. With this new system, I may not get reimbursement until… ever