Originally Posted by inky13

LOL

Here's this specifically:

It's not that bad.

Get an Excel spreadsheet fired up with all your overnights for the year. If you stayed in larger cities, try looking up the GSA rates. Otherwise, use the standard for DOT workers, $63 or $68/night. You must use either the GSA rates or the DOT Standard Rates for the entire year (can't mix and match from GSA to DOT during the year).

For each trip, determine the "travel days" (or the first and last day of the trip) to get the prorated figure. Here, you can use Method 1 or Method 2. For each trip, you can only use one method for the entire trip.

For Method 2, the example given alluded to the fact that "Jen" took about a day's worth of work to travel on her travel days, therefore she took credit for the entire day. Whereas Method 1 would have just given her 75% for each of the travel days.

With the spreadsheet, I figured out which method for each trip got me the highest allowance. When using Method 2, I pretty much came up with if my FDP for the day was about 8 hrs or more, it was counted as 100%, then prorated from there. So long as it's "consistent and IAW reasonable business practice".

Whenever I had one of the per diem companies figure it out, it was always less than what I came up with. I think it's because they only use Method 1.

Anyway, if you're bored during the SuperBowl, maybe that'll give you something to do.