APCOA FLOW - Great Idea! Implementation Failed.

Some weeks ago, I noticed the advertisement for a new APCOA product called APCOA FLOW. The idea is to equip customer who park in one of the APCOA parking lots with an RFID chip that will take care of contact-less check-in and check-out. Now, which frequent traveller does not hate having to line up for the payment, wait for the credit card to be processed, and finally extend one's arm into the rain, snow, cold wind, or whatever, to fiddle that little parking ticket into a little slot at the parking lot exit? So, APCOA FLOW is a great idea, simplifying parking and saving time.

That was my thought, so I registered for this service and promptly received a sticker with the required chip.

Yesterday, I tried it. It worked wonderfully and smoothly. Congratulations to APCOA for creating this service.

After leaving the parking lot, I received an e-mail message with a receipt within minutes. Now, I would not really call this a "receipt" because there is more or less only the parking lot information, the parking time and the amount paid on it. There is no tax information as I usually get on the ticket machine receipts.

Now, here's the problem: APCOA deducts the amount due from the credit card immediately. I, however, would only get the itemized bill with all the tax information at the end of the month. The little receipt I got by e-mail does not qualify for a travel expense statement to be ultimately charged to clients (because of missing tax information). The statement promised for the end of the month would collect all "receipts" into one single document (which is not a bill as the amounts had already been charged to the credit card by that time) and will therefore not be suitable to forward to clients, either.

So, there are two possibilities for APCOA to fix this situation:

(a) The end-of-month statement becomes a bill and I will be charged for parking only upon receipt of this document. This will still leave me the challenge of splitting up that bill into individual positions for each client the respective parking charges will have to be forwarded to for reimbursement.

(b) They do what the dumbest ticket machine can do: they simply send the receipts with the tax information for each transaction separately, and the monthly statement is a summarizing statement without commercial relevance. That should be easy and in accordance with GoBD - the German legislative framework for proper accounting and bookkeeping - which mandates that tax receipts are provided in a timely fashion in relation to when the actual charges are deducted.

It is a major surprise to me that in a country like Germany, where almost everything is about taxes and taxation, a company like APCOA misses this important aspect as they introduce a new product like FLOW to the market. FLOW does not seem overly attractive for the casual private customer, so FLOW is a benefit primarily for business travellers. However, the specific charging and billing requirements of this target group have been grossly ignored. Experiment failed.

My consequence: I will abstain from APCOA FLOW until they have fixed the receipt issue. It's presently worthless and let's me wait on average four more weeks for my travel expense reimbursement - apart from the challenge of not having individual receipts for each parking period.