Evening meal allowance - London

During lockdown 95% of our business continued without the need for Travel (all meetings were on Zoom. This kind of reinforced the idea that a lot of travel, especially International, was considered a "jolly" rather than essential. As a result of this our Board want us to cut the T&S budget by at least 30% over the next 3 years. It also looks good on our "Sustainability/CO2" reporting. We've reduced out Hotel room allowance to £180 pppn maximum inside London and £150pppn in the rest of the UK. Mileage is down to 40ppm and we've removed car allowances.

My current CEO is great - he (or his PA) always books budget hotels such as Travelodge or Premier Inn. However (human nature being what it is) most people will try to book something for £179.99 because somebody else is paying.

I normally stay close to Euston and the ones I normally go to are

Carluccio's near St Pancras
Agra on Whitfield Street
Steak & Lobster near Warren Street
Prezzo near Euston

I'm not into fine dining so I don't know where the above rank on the scale of "Povvo Chav" to "PBPHD standard" but they all seemed ok to me and well within the £35ph allowance.

ETA we don't allow alcohol unless it's a client meeting.

I didn't think so either I think HMRC have a limit of £5 per day for expenses if you havent got a receipt, otherwise they're taxable

It's my favourite (my youngest was at UCL just round the corner )so I'd arrange to meet up with her whenever I was in London for work. It's very "old school" it reminds me of Bradford in the 1980's

Prices have gone up though and portion sizes have gone down- Between us we used to be able to have a starter, a main, and two naans for about £25. Last time it was closer to £35

Double post

re: the boss not worrying - if he's the owner or major shareholder that's absolutely fine. If he isn't then he should comply with the Policy or the FD should report him to the Board.

Is it still Redfern? That was who MOJ used to use when I worked there. They were supposed to be as cheap as any of the OTAs.

Out of interest who decides what is and isn't "taking the pee"? Would it be the expenses team? Your line manager? Your Head of Department? Where there aren't clearly defined rules there's a risk of bias creeping in. Also (in my experience) regardless of whether a person is a junior admin assistant or a C-Suite executive, because human nature is what it is people will tend to claim the most they can get away with. There was a case last year where the Citibank employee was sacked tor buying two lots of sandwiches, there was the MP's expenses scandal and if your boss wants to get rid of you he might decide to through your expenses with a fine toothcomb.

IME policies need to be very clear for the benefit of both the employee and the employer. By all means have an allowance that says "Daily limit £3000" but then it's clear to all staff what the limit is. "Don;t take the pee" is just a HR headache waiting to happen.

We don't allow any personal grooming products (toothpaste, facewash, makeup, hair dye/gel, shaving cream, razors). If you need it you buy it and pay for it.

I think, instead of points, our Corporate Credit card gives us a 0.5% cashback (which goes into the company's account). However if somebody derived an incidental benefit then we wouldn't insist they pay it back to the company.

For example our IT team use their CC for amazon purchases and they have Prime for next day delivery, which means they probably get free TV. i

Unless it's been set up in an odd way SAP Concur doesn't create any delay, 99/100 it's the authorising manager who would rather only login once a month into SAP and then "batch approve" the expenses for his direct reports. If you then combine this with the Payments team only doing one expenses payment run per month then, if the stars align, it might be 2 or even 3 months before you get paid.

We process staff expenses weekly so you get paid in as little as 3 days if your line manager approves them.