Expense Reports

One thing I do not like about being a telecommuter is doing expense reports. I have to do at least one per month in order to get my money back for legitimate work-related expenses, such as my phones, Internet service, and other incidentals. When I travel, I also must include hotel, car-rental, parking, meals, etc. All in all, it ends up being a lot of reading numbers on receipts and transcribing them into an Excel spreadsheet. A lot of details. And I occasionally make mistakes. I’ve had to redo expense reports on more than one occasion as a result.

This might be a shock to some of you (and to others, absolutely no surprise), but I am not generally a detail-oriented person. Expense reports are painful for me because they require me to account for a lot of detail that is only relevant because I want to get my money back :). The “logging what happened with a customer” part of a tech support job is painful for me at times, especially when there are lots of details
to recount. I can manage to forget to buy something at the grocery store sometimes even with a detailed list. Heck, I went to the Pizza place to get two pizzas and walked out with one (forgot I needed to order the other).

Obviously, I’ve been able to get some details right over the years, having written countless FAQs on FireWall-1 and a couple of books on it too. The copyediting part of the book process just completely overwhelms me due to the number of details I have to keep straight. One issue is maintainng consistent formatting throughout, but also the sheer volume of content I must process in the given timeperiod to ensure that it is correct and accurate. It seems that any task requiring a lot of detail is difficult. Even writing what some might consider a simple email or a blog entry can take me an hour or more because it takes a lot of my energy to make sure I got the details right. Even then, I still manage to get it wrong occasionally.