e-Reimbursement Division Coordinators Winter Meeting
Date: 01/09/2014
Start/End Time: 1:00 – 2:30 PM
Location: Grainger Hall Room 3070
Announcements
· Airfare Compliance: Effective January 1, 2014, Approvers/Auditors should be sending back expense reports if travelers purchased airfare outside of policy (non-contract vendor for non-complex/individual airfare). Please see How to Process Expense Reports with Non-Contract Airfare Purchases (Approval Roles) for further details.
· e-Reimbursement Intern: Our former student intern, Bryan Jacobs, left us in December for an internship at Walt Disney World! During our hiring process, we will be handling the non-employee profiles ourselves, so please bear with us. If you have a profile you need setup quickly, please contact us directly for assistance.
· Mileage Rates for Non-Employees: Since non-employees are not eligible to use the UW or State fleet vehicles, they are rarely reimbursed for mileage at the Turndown Rate (Auto Lo); therefore, we are no longer entering the “Turndown Rate” in non-employee profiles. If you have unique circumstances that require using the Turndown Rate, please indicate this on your Non-Employee Profile Setup Form and we will be sure to enter both rates. Please see Policy 201.B Privately Owned Vehicle Expenses.
· Tax Compliance Training Available from Jose Carus: If you are interested in Tax Compliance Training for your school/college, please contact Jose Carus in Accounting Services.
Guest Visit
· UW Foundation: Guidelines for Use of UW Foundation Funds: Julie Kalsbeek and Cindy Trachta Gross visited us from the UW Foundation today. Please see the attached handout for a copy of the slides presented. Discussion included procedures and processing timelines for BOR ACH payments, direct payments to vendors, UW Foundation employee reimbursements and UW – Madison e-Reimbursement expense report payments. The e-Reimbursement billing is sent to the UW Foundation every Wednesday. UW Foundation auditors review each and every expense charged to UWF funding. If necessary, the UWF auditors will contact UW staff (Approvers) with questions. Typically, the UW Foundation makes a payment each week to the University via ACH.
What types of things hold up a UW Foundation payment?
o Missing attendee lists (If the list is not entered directly into e-Reimbursement, please send it to Meghann Suchomel who will forward it to UWF with the other billing documents.)
o Full description of charge – “Lunch” is not a full description. Also, spell out acronyms!
o Appropriate use of UW Foundation funds – Funds are generally NOT “discretionary”. If you’re unsure whether or not funding is appropriate, please contact UWF before making purchases!
o Money unavailable in fund
o Adhere to $75 per person meal limit (this is inclusive of the state maximum too!)
o State funds used first (when appropriate) before accessing UWF funds
You are encouraged to review/share the Guidelines for Use of UW Foundation Funds in e-Reimbursement with your faculty/staff as appropriate.
Updates
· Outstanding Post-Upgrade Issues:
o Employee Expense History Link: In SFS 8.9, you were able to view all expense reports on campus by clicking on the Employee Expense History link from within the Approval Queue; however, after the recent SFS upgrade, you can now only see reports that you touched in some way (e.g. saved, reassigned, approved). It was determined that this functionality was actually a bug in 8.9 and that Oracle developers “fixed” it in version 9.1. As a work-around, you can view expense reports using the following navigation: Travel and Expenses > Travel and Expense Center > Expense Reports > 2 More > View. Enter an Expense Report number and click the search button. Or, if you click on “Advanced Search,” you can also search by “Name” or “Empl ID.” The only functional difference with this “View Mode” is that you will not be able to access the comment bubbles that were entered by other Approvers/Auditors. We will continue to investigate alternate viewing methods.
o Duplicate Reports in Approval Queues: Approvers/Auditors reported seeing duplicate reports in their approval queues after adding a new expense line or splitting a receipt. We are still working on this issue. In the meantime, continue to approve the reports. This results in both reports disappearing from the queue with only one report resulting in payment.
o Approval Buttons not Present in Expense Report: When an Approver/Auditor opens an expense report, the approval buttons are not there. We have seen an increase in this since the upgrade. To resolve, clear your browser’s history, close and reopen the window, sign back into e-Reimbursement and access the report via your approval queue. If this does not resolve the issue, please email Meghann or Stefanie to alert them of the situation and indicate the steps taken prior to the buttons disappearing.
· Out of State Travel Approval Form: This form will continue to be required for all out-of-state travel charged to GPR funds.
· Policy 201.N – Relocation: Contract Vendors: Effective December 11, 2013, updates were made to the contract vendors for relocation. The current vendors are Piepho and Graebel . Please see Policy 201. N – Relocation and the Employee Relocation Guide for updated contract information.
· Guided Expense Tool (GET) Go Live: During the GET pilot, we had over 700 unique users and over 1,100 reports submitted. 96% of survey respondents said they would recommend GET to their colleagues. The official “Go Live” for GET is January 21, 2014. At that point, anyone on campus will be able to use GET to submit expense reports. Travelers may use the tool of their choice in the short-term, but we will be actively driving campus toward the use of a single tool (GET) over the course of the year. We have recently eliminated Beginner e-Reimbursement Traveler Training and replaced it with a Travel and Expense Reimbursement training session that includes a brief GET demo held at 21 North Park Street. If you are interested in scheduling a GET demo at your Division, please contact Stefanie. We will continue to offer Traveler/Alternate Advanced (Q&A) and Approver/Auditor sessions. We are in the process of updating the e-Reimbursement website to include GET information and GET sign-in buttons.
In its current state, it is predicted that GET can be used for 85% of all expense reports. We will continue development in two separate phases (GET 1.1 and GET 1.2) in order to implement all other necessary functionality (e.g. relocation expenses, receipt attachments, My Wallet functionality).
If you require assistance using GET, you may contact the DoIT Help Desk.
Open Forum
· Cash Advance Activation for All Employee Profiles: Currently, employee profiles are deactivated for cash advances by default. If a cash advance is required, the department would submit the Cash Advance Activation/Deactivation Request Form to their Division Coordinator, who would forward the request onto . Accounting Services staff then activate the profile and notify the Division/Department. At that point, the Traveler can submit a Travel Authorization and will be prompted for a Cash Advance. If the Traveler submits the TA prior to activation, he/she will not be prompted for the CA.
Our question was: How would the group feel about activating all employee profiles for cash advances and doing away with the current activation request process. Most Travelers would not even notice the change since most of them never use Travel Authorizations. If all employee profiles were activated, the employee would be prompted with a “yes” or “no” prompt when submitting the TA. If the employee said yes to receive a cash advance, the TA/CA would still need to go through two levels of approval (Approver/Auditor) prior to payment where it could be denied if needed. We see this as a very minimal risk. We also pointed out that after initial implementation, all employee profiles were activated for cash advances for about two years – with no problems.
The group consensus was: This would not be a concern. Yes, we should activate all employee profiles for cash advances. This would save administrative time/efforts.
· Blocking Travel Agencies on Purchasing Card/Corporate Card: Policy 201.A – Air Travel states that “Concur, the contracted self-booking tool, should be used to book individual domestic or non-complex international airfare.Please note that if travelers use an alternative (i.e., purchase tickets through internet sources or other travel agencies), the University will not centrally pre-pay the airfare.” It has been proposed by UWSA that we block certain vendors (e.g. Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz) on the University Purchasing Cards to assist in enforcement of this policy. If a vendor was blocked on an account and the cardholder tried to use their card to make a purchase from that vendor, the purchase would be declined at the point of sale and no transaction would post. The overwhelming group consensus was that this would be a great idea and very helpful.
· Any requests for information due to release of OpenBook? No, so far the group has not received any of these requests. If they do, please instruct individuals to use the functionality in the tool to contact the institution. All of these requests will be handled centrally.
· WISDM Enhancements for Viewing e-Reimbursement: A team is working with developers to improve the way that travel expenses appear in WISDM. We would like to make sure that the new design will meet your needs. Please send Stefanie a brief email describing what information is important for you to see when viewing expenses in WISDM.
Division Coordinator Wish List – We’ll see what we can do!
· It would be nice to add a feature to e-Reimbursement to notify travelers that even if they attached their receipts to the report, they still need to forward the hard copies to their Approver.
· Details from Travel Authorizations do not transfer to the Cash Advance – this is annoying.