Some policies are meant to provide guidance, but when they’re enforced like hard rules, things can take an interesting turn.

So, what would you do if a new boss started nitpicking your expense reports, ignoring your efforts to save the company money?

Would you push back?

Or would you make sure to spend every single penny allowed?

In the following story, a business consultant finds themselves in this exact situation.

Here’s how he handled it.

Want to limit my food expenses to a limit – I will make sure I hit the limit every day

I am a business consultant, and usually, during the week, we are at a client site and get paid for travel, meals, etc.

The meal reimbursement policy is quite flexible and doesn’t limit what we can claim, like some of the other consulting companies.

We can claim lunch, alcohol, whatever.

The policy, however, does lay down a GUIDANCE for a daily limit for food expenses, based on the country where you’re travelling.

I capitalised the word GUIDANCE since that is exactly how it is written in the policy – it is a guidance, not a hard limit.

For the UK, where my current project is, the limit is £40 per day, which is mostly ok but can be a bit low if you’re in the centre of London, for example.

While he doesn’t necessarily stick to the daily limit, his weekly average is always on point.

Now I do Intermittent Fasting, so most of the days I don’t have breakfast and lunch, and just have one big meal a day, and I have no problems keeping to the £40 (usually around £20).

On some days, I might go to a fancy restaurant, have a couple of scotches with a steak, and run up a $60 bill.

But during the course of a 5-day week, my average meals would run about £30 a day, if not less.

I’ve never had a problem claiming these expenses in my 9 years with the firm, but recently, a new project manager (read bean counter) came on board.

He sent back a couple of my expense reports for having meal expenses in excess of the £40 for a couple of days, even though the average meal expense over the week was much less than £40.

Frustrated, he now makes sure he reaches the daily limit every day.

I tried to reason with him, told him that anyway it was a guidance and not a hard limit, and I was keeping the costs down on other days.

He refused to budge and said I could only claim £40 a day for food.

So guess what, I started doing exactly that.

Every day, I made sure I was claiming £40 or thereabouts for food.

I started buying meals for the homeless people around the train station to make sure I could make up the £40.

So now, where I was claiming less than £150 a week for meals, I now claim £200 and get some good karma for it.

Yikes! The project manager should’ve backed off.

This person’s boss got in trouble for this very thing.

Carrying the budget over to the next year would’ve made more sense.

Here’s a great idea.

Yet another similar experience, but this person won the argument.

What a waste of company funds.

If the weekly average is less and saves the company money, it shouldn’t matter.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.