Expense Frequently Asked Questions
Here are just some of our most commonly asked questions.
A requestor’s immediate supervisor or higher administrative authority must approve an expense submission before reimbursement will be issued. Departments may require multiple approvers for certain expense reports; in these instances, the final approver in the submission process is held accountable. The approver should be in a higher level position of authority that is able to determine the appropriateness and reasonableness of expenses.”
To add a delegate, you will have to submit a delegate request form to the Concur Administrator and he/she will process the request.
That is the way the system is set up. All approvers must approve a report before it is processed. In fact, the processing can be delayed even longer if one approver sends the report back for a change/clarification, as once the change is made and it is resubmitted, the report goes back into the approval queue for all approvers to see again. We are aware of this issue and plan to continue to monitor both for timeliness of reimbursement and recording in the GL. Depending on what the experience is, we may want to re-look at the ORG owners to see if there are changes we can make to facilitate processing. We will also re-look at whether multiple reports can be filed in one month. Right now, we are limiting it because any reports filed over our base contract number cost over $10 each. If the central bill solution for office supplies reduces the number of SMU Cards being used and the number of transactions, we may be able to increase the number of reports allowed at little or no additional cost.
The University pays per report, so in order to keep its costs low, we want to reduce the number of reports filed, while still ensuring that any (material) expenses are reported so that budget reporting is accurate. You can build a report throughout the month, if that approach is more efficient for you – just submit it once per month.
No. Add one attendee in Concur and populate the required information with “Attached” and then attach a list that includes the names of all attendees (using the “Attach Receipt” functionality), their titles and their institution/company. There is also functionality within Concur to build attendee lists, import attendee lists and use favorites, if preferred.
Yes, information will default from the header and other information is fed over from the SMU Card feed, but you do need to change the fund and org, if appropriate, as well as making sure to use the correct expense type, attach the receipt (except in the case of Level 3 vendors that provide receipt information to the credit card processor and is included in the feed into concur) and update other required information.
We followed the guidance that Concur provided when setting these expense types up. The idea was to focus on the appropriate expense type based on what is being purchased rather than where budget funds might be allocated. We do recognize that it can be helpful to also see the code that will be charged so we did ask Concur to add it to the reports. You should now be able to see it in the Detailed Report in the Print/Email tab.
We encourage SMU Card holders and those seeking reimbursement to do their own reporting, but do recognize that there are times when a delegate may be necessary (e.g., vacations). To request a delegate, you will have to submit a delegate request form to the Concur Administrator. The form and information about the form can be found in the FORMS tab at sum.edu/expense.
What we are referring to as a level 3 vendor is a vendor that passes level 3 data through the processor. That additional data includes details of the purchase, which reflect as receipts in Concur. You should be able to tell if the vendor is passing through level 3 data when you add the expense to your report, as the receipt icon will appear. If you hover over the icon, you should see the receipt detail.
The multi-step process to select a vendor to provide a travel and expense system for the University began with a detailed RFP and also included input from faculty and staff focus groups as well as vendor demonstrations. After a thorough analysis of this information, we selected Concur, a widely known and highly regarded vendor for this type of service.
Pull up the expense in Concur and under the Details tab, click on Approval Flow. The Approval Flow will shows all approvers, including a notation “approved” for each approver who has done so. The Report Library will show where the report is in progress, as well, including if it has been paid.
All benefit-eligible faculty and staff, adjuncts, post docs and GRAs should use Concur. Others, including non-University individuals, temporary staff, undergraduate students, teaching assistants and graduate assistants should file through AP.
For SMU Card transactions, the vendor name and cardholder first name initial and last name are used. For reimbursements, the card holder’s name goes into the journal line description and the report name from the expense report header feeds into the voucher description.
A separate email is sent to each org owner charged on the report. if you own more than one org being charged, you will receive more than one email (one for each org you own).