Traveling away from home, what rights do you have regarding expenses?

[CatMandu]

If you have to travel away from home, often abroad do you have a right to a certain amount to cover meals etc? Do you have a right to a phone call home for example? I'm talking about a small firm without an HR dept. Is there such a thing as a right to this or is it down to each company?

It is down to each company.

In practice, most companies whether they have a policy or not will be happy to reimburse you for reasonable expenses - but of course what you might consider reasonable may be very different from what the person authorising the expenses, or signing the cheque would.

International 'phone calls from foreign hotels are often ridiculously expensive, and many companies expenses policies will not reimburse you for them unless incurred for a direct work purpose - for instance letting your partner know you have to stay away another day.

For routine contact home there is usually a more economical way of contacting home - buy a local 'phone card, email from internet cafe etc.

I am finance director - you should have a company policy to refer to or if not ask your finance director to explain what you can claim.

They are actually wihtin their rights to tell you to take your own sandwiches and not make any calls hom eexcept in an emergency I think.

AFAIK it's down to the company. Ours has a clearly set list of allowances - on the mean economical side i must say
The list covers b'fast / lunch / dinner / telephone / travel etc, all individually, plus an overnight pay rate. You certainly need guidance from somebody "in charge" of the company or its finances to know what you should do.

of course if you worked for me, I would be extremely generous and not make you take your own sandwiches (just to clarify)

can kewcumber come to work for the meanies charity that GW works for?

ah, have been treasurer of several charities and was professionally mean then... sory.

Besides they couldn't possibly afford me

If it helps at our company the allowance is £20.00 for dinner not including drinks and £5.00 for drinks and incidentals which include things like a phone call home and a paper.

Our contractors get £25.00 allowance.

At my company, if outside the UK, you have to provide a receipt for everything, but as long as the meal/hotel etc is reasonable in cost they will refund. We are issued with phonecards that give a better charge to the company, but if you have a company mobile, reasonable calls home are fine. When overseas you get a 10 quid a day allowance (I'm pretty sure that this is from the IR)for drycleaning, newspapers etc.

In the UK we can claim an allowance of 5 quid for breakfast, same for lunch and 12 for dinner without receipts or being taxed.

Thank you for the responses. DH has been paying his mobile phone bill for 18 months and the majority of it is used for work, he's been told he can claim back the work calls. Obviously it amounts to a lot, so I'm on his case to get on with it. DH doesn't think he can include calls home on his mobile, whilst I agree that if he's just calling to ask if he should pick up a bottle of wine on a normal day then that's our cost. However he is away a lot, I mean often Mon - Friday - surely if work requires you to be away a call to the wife and dc's is a necessity? He doesn't get overtime or time off in lieu.

I wouldn't allow someone to claim a backlog of morethan 3 months unclaimed expenses (in fact it is in my written policy) and certiably not something going back past a tax year. BUt owuld allow reasonable phone numbers

link here to overseas subsistence rates on HMRC website. I generally claim separately for business calls on my own mobile, but regard calls home as covered by the £10/day incidentals rate.

Depending on company policy how tightly it's enforced, claims can be disallowed if they're so many months old. Where I work, it's one month, but I & others have got away with 6 month old claims & a slap on the wrist

Luckily Kewcumber it has been approved, which considering it was a huge amount all totaled up and is a huge relief to me. I think it's been dragging on for ages with both dh and his boss being as useless as each other in sorting it out. Thank you for all you help though and also SpangleMaker for the link.