Employee Reimbursements Tutorial

Written authorization before the trip is not required by the Accounting Office. However, some departments and colleges do require it. If your area does not require Authorizations you can click No on the second question on the Travel Dates/Purpose screen.

If your department requires Authorizations, you need to click Yes for the second question on the Travel Dates/Purpose screen. The Authorization consists of two screens. The first screen is the Travel Dates/Purpose screen, which is required for all trips, even if you checked No to indicate an Authorization was not required.

On the Travel Dates/Purpose screen you should not change the Event Status field, unless you are canceling the trip. At the beginning of the process after you selected the Payee Name and clicked New Rmbrs you selected Yes or No responses to the Authorization Required?, Contracted Air Ticket Needed?, and Reimbursement Needed? fields . The Begin Date, End Date, Trip Scope, Departure City, Departure State, Destination City, and Destination State will already be completed if you previously did an Air Ticket Requisition. If not, you will be prompted to complete these fields. In either case you will need to complete the Justification/Description/Vacation Days and Purpose. This screen also gives you an opportunity to explain how the traveler’s courses are being covered, if applicable.

If the Travel Dates/Purpose screen is being completed as part of an Authorization, you must also click on Continue to go to the Estimate Expenses screen.

On the Estimate Expenses screen you can enter estimates of the amounts you will spend for Other Airfare, Car Rental, Mileage, Lodging, Meals, Registration, and Miscellaneous Expenses. In the example below, the (Contracted Air Ticket) field is already populated, as we completed an Air Ticket Requisition form for that amount.

When expenses are submitted on the Reimbursement, if multiple fund accounts are used they will be charged in the order and for the amounts they were created on this screen. The accounts with an asterisk are only for the Air Ticket Requisition. Any excess expenditures on the Reimbursement will be charged to the last remaining account. The encumbrances for the Authorization will be relieved in full when the first Reimbursement is posted. The encumbrances for the air ticket will be relieved in full when the monthly air ticket intramurals are posted.

A new feature added March 2008 allows entering an amount in Pre-Paid Regstn: (in the bottom center of the screen) if the registration fee was paid by a Purchasing Card. This does not affect the reimbursement amount, create an accounting entry, nor link to the Purchasing Card system, but does allow more comprehensive tracking of expenses for the trip on Employee Reimbursements. The Pre-Paid Regstn: amount will appear on the browses of Daily Expense Detail and Traveler by Depart Date.

Although the Air Ticket Requisition creates an automatic encumbrance, for the Estimate of Expenses you can opt out of encumbering the funds by clicking No. To calculate the amount you must enter in the Fnd Acct section in the lower part of the screen, click the Enter button, which will populate the Reimbursable Total field. You must enter this amount in the Amount column across the respective fund accounts. In the example below, only one fund account was used, and the amount of $660.74 was entered.

After entering the amount(s) in the Fnd Acct section you can click Enter to save the data or Continue to go to the next screen. If you made any entry errors you would have been prompted to correct them, even if you had clicked the Continue button instead of the Enter button. The Event Totl includes both the air ticket and the other estimated expenses.

For situations where a third party is paying for all expenses, the Employee Reimbursement System can route an Authorization with no dollar amounts listed in the Estimated ISU Expenses categories. However, there must be a valid fund account number listed. Having an amount in the Contracted Air Ticket field from previously doing an Air Ticket Requisition counts towards having estimated expenses or fund account numbers to save or route. It is no longer necessary to create an authorized amount of $1.00 to be able to route the authorization.

If you had clicked No on the Travel Dates/Purpose screen for both the Air Ticket Requisition and the Authorization, you would have been taken to the Travel Dates/Purpose screen, which is an abbreviated (but mandatory) version of the Authorization. The abbreviated version of the Authorization does not require fund account numbers or amounts, does not create encumbrances, and is not routed for approval before the trip. In most cases, if an Air Ticket Requisition and Authorization were not required, nothing would be entered on the Employee Reimbursement System until after the trip was completed.

After clicking Continue, you will see a summary of the estimated expenses, which must be routed for approval by clicking the Route button. After clicking Route, the bottom of the screen will read Form has been routed.

The system will send an e-mail to the approver (and proxies) for your department, which will prompt the approver to log in to E-Forms Approval to approve the Authorization. Once the Authorization has been approved, nothing needs to be done until expenses are ready to be entered after the trip. However, if the authorization is not approved and remains in routing status it will prevent the traveler from entering expenses.

Continue to Canceling a Trip