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Ask HN: How much can you expense without approval?

9 points by matt_heimer ↗ HN
What dollar amount can you spend on purchases without approval or at least without executive approval? I'm interested in building and selling DevOps tools and wonder if targeting a low friction price point would be a good idea. Is there an amount that doesn't require an expense report? Subscriptions might be auto-approved but annoying if you have to expense it every month. Hopefully this question will benefit anyone targeting audiences working at large corporations.

6 comments

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ammario
Hey Matt,

Context: I’m a co-founder at a B staged startup and not sure how broadly this applies.

Our employees ask their manager for approval before they submit an expense request. If it’s less than a few hundred dollars a year and clearly aids their productivity, the answer is yes 99% of the time.

It’s important that the product bills yearly, because our system (Ramp) has no support for recurring reimbursements.

So: long trial, yearly billing and price <$300 is best.

LinuxBender
Answers will vary wildly by corporation in my experience. As companies get bigger the levels of management grow and each level of manager and individual contributor may have different prior approval for specific expenses and specific categories of expenses. I believe your question should also ask for categories of spend that do not require additional approvals in addition to amounts of one time and reoccurring costs.
thejteam
I work for a government contractor and I need approval for basically everything, regardless of price. Monthly expenses just make more work for us, so yearly is virtually required.
matt_heimer
Thanks, that helps. As a consumer I always saw yearly subscriptions an attempt to lock-in consumers but it'd be less of a hassle in the B2B space where expense reports are the norm.
codingdave
There is a difference between allowed amount to spend without approval and allow amount without an expense report. For most managers, expense reports are just part of the job, so I would not worry about that friction. Avoiding approvals is valid if you need a quick sales cycle to get rolling, but in the long run, you actually want approvals. You want everyone up the chain to have had a hand in choosing your product, because then everyone has a vested interest in keeping it to prove they made the right decision.
matt_heimer
That's an interesting take. I've seen that with very large purchases that are part of critical infrastructure. I was more thinking more along the lines of save-time, reduce-headaches type of tools for developers or operations but maybe I should focus more on essential workflow tooling.