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Topic starter
Morning! I wanted to get some feedback from those using the GSA rates for per diem reimbursement and also let you know about an issue I discovered in Concur.
For the first and last day of travel, we all know that you start by taking 75% of the full day's per diem (including incidentals). Then, if any meals are being excluded, you have to subtract them at the full meal rate not the reduced meal rate. But when all meals are being excluded and the traveler is only receiving incidentals in reimbursement, my understanding was that you still received the full incidental amount in reimbursement. This is based off of the FTR 300-11.18 which states that "the total amount of deductions made will not cause you to receive less than the amount allowed for incidental expenses." In the legacy Travel Allowance, this is also how Concur handled the calculation but the new Travel Allowance Service is giving as little as $3.50 ($5*.75) on the first or last day of travel if all meals are excluded. I'd love to hear how this calculation is being managed at other universities whether you're using Concur or not!
The other issue I discovered while investigating this this morning is regarding the meal breakdown in Concur for locations with a $74/day rate. The breakdown for the FY25 rates is $18/breakfast, $20/lunch, and $31/dinner with $5/incidentals. The breakdown in FY24 for $74/day was $17/breakfast, $18/lunch and $34/dinner with $5/incidentals. When calculating per diem for travel in FY24 however, the system is using the breakdown from FY25 in error. This issue is likely because $74 is the only rate utilized in both the FY24 rates and FY25 rates but I have opened a support case on this so it can hopefully be corrected ASAP.
Posted : 04/11/2024 5:47 am
I don't know if this is a glitch that was fixed or just with your account, but when I leave only incidental on the 1st & last day of the trip (75%), my Incidental is still $5.00.
I didn't test the FY24 vs FY25 rates.
Posted : 04/11/2024 6:09 am
Topic starter
Devon, thanks for the quick reply! Are you on the new Travel Allowance Service or the Legacy Travel Allowance? The rate calculated correctly for us in the Legacy but we just updated to the Travel Allowance Service last week and discovered this issue today.
Posted : 04/11/2024 6:15 am
Oh, I'm on the Legacy. We haven't updated yet. Sorry about that!
Posted : 04/11/2024 6:23 am
I am curious to know if concur resolved the issues you discovered as we are considering updating the new travel allowance service. We are still on Legacy at this time.
thank you
Dawn
Posted : 10/04/2025 3:36 am
We are still using Legacy so I'm curious as well!
Posted : 10/04/2025 4:13 am
Curious too! Still on legacy.
Posted : 10/04/2025 5:02 am
We encountered a lot of issues testing the new TA in our sandbox environment. We eventually had to abandon testing because we ran into the start of our ERP implementation.
From our testing, I found out that you can have "Daily Allowance (Incidentals)" included as a separate itemization expense type, or not. I'm not sure if that affects the calculation. However, it seems Concur has a lot of flexibility in how the new TA is configured. But they took a long time to figure out how to configure some of the changes we needed.
The major issue we encountered was that the per diem was not included in the travel request's total dollar amount, nor in the printed report total. I'm not sure whether it would have come through on the standard request extract (SRE).
Justin
Posted : 10/04/2025 1:20 pm
Topic starter
Good news: Concur did fix the calculation issue as well as the rate breakdown! Now if you exclude all meals (or most meals, depending on the rate) on the first or last day of travel, you'll still see the incidental rate calculated at 75% but there will be an adjustment to the incidental amount to bring the total for the day up to the full incidental rate for the destination. For the rate breakdown, I don't think they fixed more than the last fiscal year which was fine for us as we do not reimburse expenses submitted more than 180 days in arrears. But I wanted to mention that in case your institution allows for older expenses.
Overall, we've been happy with the new TA Service. It's much more user friendly for the itinerary creation and folks really like seeing the totals within the wizard before the expenses are added to the report. We don't use the SRE so the issue that Justin mentioned doesn't impact us. It was also fairly simply to configure a percent rule for hotels (we allow up to the GSA rate * 150%) without having to educate people to check the "Use Percent Rule" box for each day of travel.
Posted : 15/04/2025 9:23 am
Hi Rebecca (and anyone who may know the answer),
Do you know if there is an option to open the new feature to a partial audience? Or is it all or nothing?
Thanks in advance!
Posted : 15/04/2025 11:15 am
Topic starter
I’m 99% sure that Travel Allowance is either on or off for your site BUT you can setup different configurations by group or other profile fields. I’d recommend reaching out to support to confirm though.
Posted : 15/04/2025 12:02 pm
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