You’re gonna reject my lunch expense for being less than $2 over? Time to go back and claim absolutely everything I’ve neglected, and then some.

So I started working in a sort of consulting role about 6 months ago, and there’s tons of stuff we can expense when we’re out at the client’s location. However, I’m pretty lazy about all that, so I usually don’t bother. I get it, stuff adds up, but HR, my managers, and the partners have all been reminding us to keep costs down, and I wanted to be a team player. Plus, to me in general, it just never felt necessary to expense like $3 in mileage.

One of the things I do regularly expense is we have a daily $25 allowance for lunch. Well, a couple months ago, I decided to grab an extra bottle of water with my lunch, and whoops, the total came out to $26.87. When I submitted my expenses, HR sent back my entire expense report asking me to fix $1.87 on a $2,000ish expense report.

Well guess what. All those expenses I wasn’t expensing before because I didn’t feel like they were worth my time? You better bet they’re all worth it now. I went back through my calendar, on company time mind you, and I claimed every little bit of mileage I could, going all the way back to my third week at the firm when I started going out to clients. I went through the handbook as well, scouring it for things I could expense. Suddenly, I’m claiming all the business supplies I purchased. I’m claiming all the Starbucks runs I thought were a personal expense. Phone line, business cards, laptop accessories, a portable scanner/printer, ChatGPT subscription, MS Office for my home computer, I went on a shopping spree, making sure of course, to stay within my company’s policy on everything.

The funnest one is, we’re allowed to expense parking fees at a client’s office. The client I’ve been working with, I’ve been there every day for about 3 months now. The all-day parking rate is $30/day, but a monthly parking pass is $210. Being a smart consumer, I bought the monthly pass and that was all I originally expensed. But once my expense report got bounced back I removed the monthly passes and put in a $30 parking charge for every day I’ve been there. So instead of a $630 expense for the last 3 months, it’s suddenly a $1,980 expense, of which I’m picking up $1,350 of arbitrage for myself.

I feel so petty, but also it feels fucking amazing seeing a roughly $6,000 expense report get paid out to my checking account after a $2,000 report got bounced back for an overage of less than two fucking dollars. Hope it was worth it, you cheap bastards.