Hi Rebecca,

We also require all employee travel to be pre-approved via Concur Request. We allow blanket travel authorizations, covering up to one year, that authorize trips for the same purpose for in-state travel (so in-state recruitment trips, overnight or not, would be covered). If the coach needs to travel overnight out of state, they would need to get a Request approved prior to booking. But your school may choose to allow blanket Requests for out of state travel too, if that still meets your obligation to the state.

In order to get the Request approved in a timely manner, it helps to have approvals streamlined. The more approvals needed, the slower the process.

It might also help to have a delegate or the traveler copy a prior Request and alter the dates/destinations as needed.

We train our employees that a travel Request is a "best-guess estimate" and that it isn't always going to perfectly reflect the actual trip, given the nature of available flights and unexpected changes. For Blanket authorizations, we recommend adding expected expenses that would encompass the year (or however long the blanket covers) of estimated expenses. Expense reports generated from the Blanket Request deduct from the total amount, which is nice information for approvers.

Most trips so require a single Request. Team travel lists the expected roster and additional employees expected to travel, and all the associated expenses. At our school most athletics trips involve a cash advance linked to the Request for athlete per diem.

You can integrate Request with Travel in a couple of ways- either book to Request, or Request to book. Our rules require the Request be approved before booking. We haven't integrated yet because we just implemented Concur about 1.5 years ago, and we also don't mandate our Travel booking tool so we wanted to keep things simpler at first. Eventually we want to integrate with Travel (Request approved, then turn the segments to bookings).

Hello

We use Request as a trip registration. We only require approvals if the REQUEST has a Cash Advance or if the REQUEST is being submitted after the trip dates.

All Expense Reports require approvals (budget and supervisor etc)

We = Univ of Utah. 🙂

Darrin