I flew into a city that was a 2½ hour drive away from my client. Flights were extra expensive on short notice so driving for an extra 2½ hours to save $400 seemed reasonable to me. This was a week of work for a client that I know is very cost conscious and under a lot of economic pressure. Even though my work was a sizable investment itself, I felt like they would appreciate my cost conscious gesture to save on expenses.

I was right. When my office manager sent over the invoice and expense report they had looked over every inch and saw the savings. They were impressed and thanked me during a follow up conference call.

The trouble started after the expense report left the executive team and got into the finance department. Apparently there was a missing receipt for a meal at Arbys, a $6 value. They flagged it and sent an email notice to my office manager, Devan, rejecting the entire invoice.

The receipt was originally with the expense report but somehow after scanning them it was misplaced. No problem; the charge was on the company credit card. Devan got a copy of the credit card receipt and sent it over. Not good enough; the expense was rejected and the invoice with the reimbursement was held up again.

At this point, Devan felt like the $6 charge simply wasn’t worth the effort to re-engage the executive team and me over. But the misplaced receipt was holding up the entire invoice payment. He would have paid it himself just to get financial approval. But he was dealing with a strict financial manager determined to follow policy and hold the line.

Devan had no choice but to call me. I then placed a call to the executive team and the issue was resolved within a few minutes. They apologized for the problem but the irony wasn’t lost on them. Here was a well intentioned manager determined to hold the line for a $6 charge not realizing that it was being compared to a $400 savings on a project worth hundreds of thousands to the executive team.

I’m sure the financial manager felt like she was doing a good job holding the line on expenses. But a quick consideration of the big picture could have saved her some embarrassment from her executive team.

Posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 11:27 am under News.
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