Army Mover
You have hit the nail on the head. Attempts to cut costs on short term detachments or AT stopovers invariably did not work at all, or finished up costing money.
One favourite trick of Command Accounts was to send out a team ahead of a Detachment to negotiate special meal "contract" rates. This team rarely travelled on Military Aircraft, and they did not always travel Economy. And of course, because detachment rules were not in place, they paid themselves the going Foreign Office Rate.
These special meals were always time dependent. You can guess it, quite a lot of flights were planned to operate outside these times. Even when the planning was good many meals were still purchased twice.
The number of times we swapped over from contract to rates to contract to actuals, all because some bright spark of an Accountant wanted to make a name for himself.
Bit like QNH / QFE / QNH / QFE.
Now please don't start me off on that one.