Policy violation
An expense or purchase that breaks a rule in the company's spending policy, such as exceeding a limit or missing a receipt.
In short
- Most violations are honest mistakes: a missing receipt, the wrong category, a limit nobody remembered.
- Flagging them at submission is far better than finding them in an audit.
- Recurring violations usually point to an unclear policy or an unrealistic limit.
A policy violation is any spending that falls outside the rules the company has set. It can be as small as a receipt submitted after the deadline or as clear as an alcohol charge on a policy that excludes alcohol.
Common violations
- Missing or non-itemized receipts
- Amounts over a meal, hotel or per-transaction limit
- Non-reimbursable items such as upgrades, personal items or fines
- Late submission
- Purchases outside a card's allowed merchant categories
- Splitting a purchase to stay under an approval threshold
Handling them
Not every violation deserves the same response. Some should block the expense until fixed, like a missing receipt. Some should go to a manager for a judgment call, like a hotel $30 over the cap during a conference. Some should simply be recorded, like a late submission. Treating them all as rejections slows everyone down; letting them all through makes the policy meaningless.
Violations are also information. If a third of hotel claims in one city break the limit, the limit is probably wrong. If one person accounts for most violations, that is a conversation to have.
Worked example
Three flags on one report
A report is flagged three times: a $268 hotel night against a $250 cap, a $12 coffee with no receipt and a $45 dinner with wine on the bill. The system routes the hotel to the manager, who approves it because of a conference rate, asks for a note on the coffee, and deducts the $14 wine from the dinner reimbursement.