Fast Food, Not Fine Dining, Tops Expense Account List IN nearly 15 years of writing this column every week, the cold hammer of oppression has come down on me from New York just once, more than 10 years ago. On a trip to San Francisco, I was too tired to find a restaurant, so I stopped at a Walgreens near Union Square, bought a cheap little canned ham and some rolls and made a sandwich back in my hotel room. Later, a big editor who has been a friend since we served together in Vietnam in 1968 became alarmed after seeing my expense account. "You can't put a canned ham on your expense account," he admonished. It just looks stupid. Next time, please find a restaurant and have a proper dinner. I resisted the urge to remind him that we had shared a lot of less-fashionable food than a $5 ham back in our days in Saigon, or that canned meat products were quite de rigueur with survivalist stockpilers. No, I just accepted the fact that as a frugal traveler, even on the company dime, one of my expense accounts could generate some home-office derision, and that I was out of step as a business traveler. Or was I? I have the latest quarterly report from a major expense-account software-management firm called Certify, in which restaurants are ranked by the frequency with which they turn up on expense accounts. Certify says that the rankings are based on analysis of "millions of business receipts from the past three months" from its corporate clients. Certify's so-called SpendSmart quarterly report analyzes spending in all areas of business travel, including airlines, hotels and car-rental companies. But the food spending was most interesting to me. 1 in most-expensed restaurants was Starbucks, followed by McDonald's and Subway. I realize that none of them sell canned hams, but still, those rankings do provide some indication of what a lot of business travelers now regard, or at least accept, as a proper meal. Incidentally, in the report's top-rated restaurants, a category where restaurants are ranked aspirationally rather than just on frequency of purchases, the top five are Jimmy John's, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Panera Bread, and (ready for this one?) Dunkin" Donuts. "There is this image with business travel of, O.K., we're going to have a big client dinner with steak and a $100 bottle of wine, but the truth of the matter is that's by far the minority of travel spending out there," said Robert Neveu, chief executive of Certify. More than ever, he said, business travelers "are on the run, rushing between meetings, rushing to catch a plane" and a lot more likely to grab and go, rather than dine and linger. "It's not because we can't spend more as travelers; it's not because our companies won't allow us to," he said. I mean, they don't mandate that we have to spend less than $12, say, for lunch. Some do, but generally that's not the case. It's more of the convenience time-factor than anything. There's another factor, Mr. Neveu said: "The availability of Wi-Fi. That always is a driver. A lot of people say, If I have to choose between a restaurant that has Wi-Fi and one that doesn't, I'm going to go with the Wi-Fi. Another major business travel expense management company, Concur, had similarly interesting findings about evolving business-travel spending in an analysis of the roughly $50 billion in travel and entertainment spending (an average of $3,244 per individual filer per quarter) that it processed for clients last year. In 2012, the Concur report said, expense-report spending on dining declined 11.1 percent. Business travel over all accounts for $1.12 trillion in global spending, of which about $273 billion will be spent this year in the United States, up from $262 billion in 2012, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Global spending this year will be up 5.4 percent over all, the trade association says. With airfares and hotel rates rising, the most remarkable trend as I see it is that decline in dining expenses. To me, it's evident that the growing "grab and go" culture is behind that. So is the trend toward ordering takeout food in hotel rooms or anywhere else that's convenient, driven by the increased availability of fast delivery services and the ease with which menus can be perused and meals ordered online and on mobile devices. That is especially true in New York, long a global colossus in speedy food delivery. According to Certify's report, in New York, the most-expensed meal vendor by far for business travelers in the third quarter was a company called Seamless. Seamless, an online and mobile food-delivery and takeout service, recently merged with another online delivery company, GrubHub, to form a giant service that will have a network of about 25,000 restaurants in cities across the United States, and also in London. The company, now called GrubHub Seamless, has a wide variety of cuisines available, along with restaurant reviews. None of them, from what I can ascertain, offer to deliver a canned ham. But I'm guessing that, too, could be arranged, at least in a city like New York. So bon appétit.