I Love the Accounts Payable Department
Feb 1st, 2007 by Alex
One of the wonders of working a nine to five sort of job is getting reimbursed for things. I don’t have a lot of luck when it comes to the reimbursement paperwork. There’s never a simple one for me; I almost always get the paperwork returned to me.
About two weeks ago I buy two packages of 50 Ideal RJ-45 modular plugs at Home Depot for a project. Normally I prefer AMP for premise wiring connectors, but we needed them then and I knew they would be suitable for CAT-5e patch cables. The following day I submit an ER to my company, including the original receipt and reason for purchase.
A week or so goes by and I hear nothing… which is generally a good sign. No response means that it hasn’t been rejected yet.
Two days ago I receive an email from AP saying that my ER has in fact been rejected and that I’ll have to login to the system to find out why. Lovely. I don’t understand why they couldn’t include the notes in the email, but that’s a different complaint for a different time. I contact my office admin to see if she can login and find out; turns out she already has and has re-submitted my ER.
Get this.
AP denied my expense report because they believed that my purchase was for personal use.
That’s just insulting. Why would I — somewhat irked but still rational — purchase less-than-great modular connectors that I wouldn’t use in my own home and then attempt to get my employer to pay for them? Especially when I’ve got a box of several hundred of my preferred brand/quality sitting in my office at home? I know it. Somewhere there’s a little-used-system-that-sits-in-the-corner-humming-away that calculated that I (in my official position) would be most likely to stiff the company for $36 worth of supplies that I didn’t even get to use personally. Forget the couple hundred bucks here and there for hotel expenses and training costs… no no no, raise that flag over $36.
I love my job. It’s the silly administrative stuff that never goes my way that drives me nuts.
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