In message , at 19:35:22 on
Wed, 25 Oct 2017, Richard remarked:

As a much travelled businessman (in general terms) I can assure you that
the lack of a paper receipt/ticket to attach to my expenses claim is a
huge disadvantage.

Like Neil, mine are on-line.

How do you get the dozens of transport operators you only use once a
year to push the receipts to this online system? And no, I'm not going
to set up accounts with Obscuristan bus company ahead of travelling to
facilitate it.

That's a good point, but I might not bother for small amounts, and
equally my company might not need evidence in these cases, I haven't
checked.

Big companies are different because they can negotiate what's called a
"dispensation" with HMR&C to pay up to certain[1] daily amounts in
travel and subsistence, and are allowed to self-police the receipting
process (where it helps if they have an internal published scale). This
doesn't apply to smaller companies and particularly not the self-
employed.

Anything major is paid by the company, using a corporate
booking tool that finds hotels at prices more than I could get, but
oddly finds cheap flights.

That's not especially odd, and sounds like a legacy hotel booking system
which are legendarily captured by rack-rate deals with specific chains -
partly justified by saving time having to research and negotiate each
night's stay individually. Tacking on airline flights suffers (from the
tool's point of view) from the greater transparency of third party price
comparison sites, so people can see if the fares are as outrageous as
the hotel rooms often are, plus the (literally) ticket-price can be up
an order of magnitude higher, so the buyers are more alert to possible
savings.

Richard.

[1] There's big table sorted by country, and sometimes with extra
entries for capital cities etc where it's accepted that prices are
higher),
--
Roland Perry