Remove "spending money like it's your own" because it's no longer the case

Why is this change being made?

I'm requesting to remove these both Guidelines when it's coming to spending company money:

1. Spend company money like it is your own money. No, really.
2. You don't have to ask permission before making purchases in the interest of the company. When in doubt, do inform your manager prior to the purchase, or as soon as possible after the purchase.

Why:

1. We have a pretty long list on how to handle expenses. I cannot spend money like it is my own money because I need an approval for everything from my manager.
2. I have to ask for permission pretty much every time when - in my case - I need to book a train here in Germany. As part of the Sales/CS team frequent travels are necessary.

And to give you a proper example and my specific problem (cc @Drelli):

• Problem: Train trips in Germany regularly costs 100€, so I need an approval from my manager
• Possible solution: In Germany you can purchase a "Bahncard" which gives you 25%/50% discount for a year on all train rides. This ticket costs 244€ (when using the Bahncard50 for 50% discount).
• Problem: I don't get an approval for that Bahncard which would pay itself off in just a few train rides. If we consider a train ticket for 100€ it would result in 50€ discount. After 5 tickets (which are 2,5 back and forth trips) it would pay off (simple math).
• Not a problem: This ticket is not a taxable benefit for a traveling employer because the main benefit (and the payoff) is for the company. And this is pretty common in Germany as I had this Bahncard at previous companies as well.
• Note: I heard the colleagues in France have a similar issue.

If we would follow our principles/guidelines:

• I could spend the money like my own, which I can't because I need an approval and I don't get it
• I have to ask for permission every time, which is time consuming for myself, my manager and the accounts team who needs to check the approvals.
• We would trust our team members that this is useful

Given that this is big pain for myself I'd say we should either:

• Remove the guidelines as we're not following it any more
• ideally we would evolve our approach so that employees feel empowered to make decisions aligned with company result

I'm all in favor for the latter but I want to start the discussion here. My ideal solutions would be that this will not be merged and that we can actually spend money like it's your own especially when it saves the company money! Others might add their own stories here.

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