Per Diem – Definition and Implementation
“Per Diem” is the Latin for “per day” or “for each day.” It refers to a defined sum of money that an organization allows an individual to spend daily, covering his/her living and travelling expenses. These living expenses have to be directly correlated to either the business or the work that a person performs when away from home (for more info: please refer to IRS Publication 463). A “Per Diem” is sometimes defined as the allowance given to the employee/worker for completing a task; however, this definition can sometimes lead to confusion since the actual travel cash allowance paid to employees is to cover their travel expenses.
In web2expense TE, per diem refers to the sum of money that an organization allows an individual to spend per day. Allowance refers to the amount of money an organization pays to an individual before travel, and accounts for that money after the trip. These definitions are in accordance with United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) definition as defined in publication 1542.
Generally, handling per diem expenses in an expense report is a difficult and tedious task. Recently, the US General Services Administration (GSA) created a web service to fetch these rates for individual cities so that individuals or organizations can use these rates while preparing an expense report. Even with this service in place, creating an expense report with several per diem cities will still cost you a couple of hours.
A video showing how to reduce that time spent in creating an expense report will be posted soon.
For more information about this or other functional aspects of web2expense TE visit www.web2expense.com, contact us at 1-866-WEB2EXPENSE, or email us at support@web2expense.com.
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