National Expense Report Day – October 14, 2025

History of National Expense Report Day

Expense reporting is as old as commerce itself… literally. The oldest known written record ever discovered wasn’t a poem or a law, but a receipt carved into a clay tablet in Mesopotamia over 5,000 years ago. From the very start, humanity has been obsessed with tracking what we spend—and equally frustrated by the paperwork that comes with it.

For centuries, merchants, accountants, and employees have been stuck in the same cycle: record every transaction, keep every receipt, and prove every expense. In ancient markets, this meant chiseling records into stone or scrawling them onto parchment. By the 1800s and early 1900s, it meant ledgers filled with neat rows of ink, and shoeboxes stuffed with paper receipts.

The arrival of computers in the late 20th century promised relief, but for most workers, it simply meant swapping paper for spreadsheets. By the 1980s, expense reports were digital but still tedious. Employees spent hours entering line items, attaching crumpled receipts, and praying their math added up. Finance teams, meanwhile, spent equally long hours auditing, correcting, and chasing down missing documentation. The frustration was universal.

Then came the rise of cloud-based expense platforms in the 2000s. These tools made life easier but not easy enough. Employees were still doing the busywork, just on a slightly sleeker screen. And even today, billions of hours are wasted each year on a process that could be almost entirely automated.

That’s where Ramp comes in. Expense reporting, as painful as it’s always been, is officially a solved problem. With automation and real-time visibility, Ramp makes expense reports faster, simpler, and in many cases, unnecessary. Yet not every company has switched yet! That means millions of workers are still stuck doing things the “old way.”

Enter National Expense Report Day. Created in 2025, this holiday is equal parts satire and call to action. Its purpose is to recognize the absurdity of an outdated ritual that has been tormenting workers since the dawn of writing and to celebrate the innovation that’s finally putting an end to it.

The inaugural celebration features Brian Baumgartner (better known as Kevin from The Office) sitting in a glass box in New York City, furiously tackling expense reports the old, painful, inefficient, time-consuming way. It’s a spectacle designed to spark laughter but also a reminder that there’s a better way forward.

One day, October 14 won’t be National Expense Report Day at all. It will be National Expense Report Remembrance Day, a moment to look back at thousands of years of receipts, ledgers, and shoeboxes, and be grateful that the pain is finally behind us.