At the University of Southern Indiana (USI), Travel Procurement (we) require all travel being funded by USI to have a Pre-Approval (PA) submitted in our travel and expense software Chrome River (implemented in March 2019). We request the PA be submitted as soon as the traveler knows about the upcoming travel. There are some faculty/staff that do have unexpected last-minute travel and those who just wait to the last minute to enter the PA in Chrome River. Regardless, USI will not pay for travel expenses or reimburse a faculty/staff person who does not have a fully processed PA in the system. This motivates the majority of our faculty/staff to submit the PA in Chrome River well before their departure date. We also let our travelers know that they can track their PA and contact the approval person to move the PA along quicker for those PAs that are time-sensitive.

Susan, are you considering the integration of Request and Travel to enforce this? Either Request to Travel, or Travel to Request? We chose not to integrate at UNC for those last minute situations you mentioned. I also have a vague recollection that some institutions have tried it and ending up needing to un-integrate them but I cannot recall who it was, unfortunately.

Thank you Tricia. We sometimes find that the travel that was claimed to be unexpected really wasn't but it is a convenient excuse.

Rebecca- Yes- the integration between Request and Travel is what we need to decide. I didn't realize that the integration can be either way- we will have to explore that. We will be starting our implementation later in May and maybe Concur can share why some universities decided to un-integrate. We are just feeling that if we are going to enforce compliance with our policy that now would be the time to do it. Thanks

We don't have Request and Travel integrated but we do require an approved request prior to booking. We require that a request be attached to all travel expense reports or an exception must be submitted, reviewed, and approved before reimbursement is allowed. We require executive approval on the request side if the travel request is submitted after the trip start date ("after-the-fact" travel).

Thanks Justin- We are going to try requiring a Dean or VP approval for our "after-the-fact" travel requests to see if that increases compliance. We are hoping that faculty/staff will want to avoid getting approval from a dean or VP OR the deans/VPs will get annoyed with faculty/staff who don't do the request and not approve them so the employees suffer a monetary loss for not complying with policy. We will see how it goes....

Susan: a little more insight on integration in case Concur hasn't gotten into these details with you. If you integrate Request to Travel then the traveler must have an approved Request in place in order to book travel. We chose not to do this because our travelers may need to book something last minute or over a weekend and they cannot control the availability of their approver(s). Similarly, if you integrate Travel to Request then you can book at any time but then your Request must be approved within 24 hours otherwise your reservation is automatically cancelled. This again seemed problematic if the booking was happening over a weekend or if the approvers were unavailable to approve on such short notice. To help enforce the requirement of a Travel Request, we instituted a required field in the booking process where the traveler fills in their request ID number. This field does not validate the Request ID number or check if the Request has been fully approved, but it gives us the ability to run reporting and follow up with travelers as needed who have not followed the proper process.

Good Morning Colleagues.

Michigan State University requires that a Request be submitted, and approved in advance to travel being booked and expense report being submitted. Close in travel should not be an issue as long as your Concur config allows for admins to approve and bypass approvers that may not be able to review/approve in the time required due to close in requests.

That being said, MSU has not required an approved Request be in place to allow travelers/admins to book travel due to the reasons stated in this thread by others. After the fact Requests can be approved as "exceptions" but, do require an admin to allow the exception in Concur. For an admin to approve the exception, an authorized approver still must log in to Concur and approve the after-the-fact request. According to our Contract and Grant audit unit, this process provides auditable proof of review and approval.

We do, however, require that an approved Request be in place, and attached to a submitted Expense Report. Audit is accomplished both through automation and human review of any Expense report submissions that error out.

In answer to your last question - MSU did start out with this approval string and has not changed the requirement.

Cheers, Ed

Thank you Rebecca and Ed for your additional insights. We have decided to move forward with the Request to Travel integration. We have found through audits that the majority of our employees who do not do a request in advance now say it's because they didn't know they had to or we have made it too easy to just do an after the fact request with an explanation. It is rarely because of last minute emergency travel that couldn't be approved in time. So we decided to treat those truly as exceptions that can be justified and approved by Deans/VPs offices. We are hoping that the threat of requiring Dean/VP approval when it could have been avoided by doing the request up front will curtail the number and keep us in better compliance with our university system policy.

I'll let you all know if we made the right decision! 🙂