A company I worked for expected people who travelled on company business to guarantee, and pay for, hotac and other ground expenses with our own resources. The hotel stays often went to several weeks in expensive hotels. They provided commercial air tickets for the original journey but any changes or extensions also had to be funded by us.
On completion of the journey we submitted expense reports which some petty minded clerk who had never travelled more than 5 miles from home went through, and if approved through several layers of bureaucracy, it was repaid to us. They sometimes refused to pay out against receipts in Cyrillic, Arabic or other alphabets. I was also asked to provide 'official' receipts for taxi and rickshaw journeys on the Indian subcontinent.
Obviously the approval process took some time and the bill usually hit us in the pocket before the credit from the company. Eventually they agreed that 'under extreme circumstances' they would give an advance but we had to walk on our hands to get this and it usually required a week or so advance notice and we often had to make trips at much shorter notice. At one stage they would only give the advance in cash, not very smart for a number of reasons.
All this was before internet banking, so the administration was a nightmare.
Then they gave us company credit cards but the payment still came out of our own accounts, although they had a longer than normal billing cycle so that if you were lucky, you were refunded before the debit hit the account.