CONCUR: Travel & Expense

In accordance with IRS guidelines effective January 1, 2019, the University’s business mileage reimbursement rate will be 58 cents per mile up from 54.5 cents for 2018. This rate applies to trips within the Houston area and to mileage claimed as part of reimbursement for other travel on behalf of the University.  Auto mileage for relocation effective January 1, 2019 will be reimbursed at 20 cents per mile up from 18 cents for 2018.

ExpenseIt functionality (i.e., mobile receipt capture) is now available directly within the Concur mobile application. As a current ExpenseIt user, this upgrade has been rolled out beginning today, August 13, 2018.

ExpenseIt Overview and other FAQ’s:

Q: What is ExpenseIt in the Concur mobile app?

A: ExpenseIt in the Concur mobile app is a value-added service to the Concur app that turns receipts into expense line items, and sends them directly into Concur Expense. It makes submitting receipts, creating expense reports and getting reimbursed quicker and easier by doing a lot of the work for you.

Q: What are the benefits of ExpenseIt?

A: ExpenseIt can help you to:

1. Reduce lost receipts: lost or misplaced paper receipts are virtually eliminated
2. Categorize and itemize expenses: you can be confident in the accuracy of your expenses with optical character recognition (OCR) technology and intelligence to itemize complex receipts
3. Increase productivity: receive time back when you spend minutes (not hours) on expense reports, making it easier for faster approvals, shortening the entire expense report process.

Q: Does it require any downtime?

A: No, this upgrade does not require any downtime.

Q: Is any data moving because of this change?

A: No, data is not moving because of this change.

Q: What happens if I am not seeing the upgrade within my application?

A: In some unique cases, you may have to turn on ExpenseIt within Concur moblle. To do so in the Concur mobile app: select the menu, choose ‘settings’, and then turn on or off the toggle for ExpenseIt. If you still have issues after taking this step, please submit a support case through the Customer Support Portal.

Q: Do I have to take any action after they are upgraded?

A: Yes. You will need to verify that you are using the latest version of Concur mobile (at least 9.52 or above). If you are not seeing the upgrade, you should follow the instructions above.

Q: Does logging in change for me?

A: You will use your Concur mobile log-in to now access ExpenseIt within the Concur mobile app.

Q: How can I edit ExpenseIt entries in the Concur app?

A: You can see the ExpenseIt entries in the mobile app under the ‘Expenses’ tab. From there, you can open the ExpenseIt entry and edit the information if required. Editing entries may be more common in cases where mobile receipts were submitted for languages ExpenseIt is not optimized to support.

In accordance with IRS guidelines effective January 1, 2018, the University’s business mileage reimbursement rate will be 54.5 cents per mile up from 53.5 cents for 2017. This rate applies to trips within the Houston area and to mileage claimed as part of reimbursement for other travel on behalf of the University.  Auto mileage for relocation effective January 1, 2018 will be reimbursed at 18.0 cents per mile up from 17 cents for 2017.

YEAR – END/NEW FISCAL YEAR PROCESS:

Key Dates –
– Thursday, June 30th – Concur expense reports with deposits must have money deposited at the Cashier’s Office by 4:00 and the expense report must be approved by 5:00 pm. Depositing money due Rice at the Cashier’s Office prior to June 30th is strongly recommended to allow sufficient time for the report to be approved.
– Monday, July 4th – Pcard charges sent to the bank by the vendor on or prior to this date will be included in FY17 business. Charges after July 4th will be recorded in FY18. Please refer to the two dates below regarding expense reports where re-allocations are done.
– Friday, July 9th by midnight – Concur expense reports without deposits must be approved in order to be recorded in FY17.
– Monday, July 10th – This is the first day to submit expense reports for FY18.

Process –
– All charges are in the 72356 account, whether they are for travel or non-travel.
– Any travel charge pertaining to FY18 must have a Concur expense report started and the header record field “Trip/Report End Date” completed with the future trip’s end date; the travel related charges in these expense reports will be recorded as FY18 expense.
– Please remember to allow time for the report to route to the Concur Audit Service (if selected) and for the report to be approved by the approver(s).
– The Concur system will remain available for use. FY18 expense reports can be worked on but should NOT be submitted before Monday July 10th. If reports are submitted and approved prior to July 10th, the expenses will be recorded in FY17.
– Expense reports must be approved by the specified deadlines. If deadlines are missed, there is no alternate reallocation method available. Please remember to factor in the possibility that expense reports may be routed through Concur’s Audit Service (CAS); 10% of expense reports are randomly selected for audit by CAS. The expense report routing occurs once reports are submitted and prior to reports being sent to the approver. CAS has on average a monthly goal of responding within 72 hours. Since this timing is an average, some reports do exceed 72 hours.

Please clear pcard expenses for FY17. There are a significant number of pcard charges that are uncleared. For those areas with few uncleared charges, thanks very much for the good work!

Southwest Airlines has announced the switchover of their internal reservation system on Monday May 8, 2017.

What this means to our travelers.

Booking Southwest reservations:

• When making a Southwest reservation in AirPortal/Concur with an outbound on May 8th or earlier and a return onMay 9th or later, you will be unable to complete this itinerary and will receive an error message.
• Instead, you will need to make two separate reservations-one for the outbound and one for the return. This is due to your itinerary spanning two separate Southwest reservations systems. Your outbound flight will be reserved in the old system and your return flight in the new.
• You will receive a separate confirmation number for each reservation.
• If you need assistance while making a Southwest reservation via the online booking tool, please contact Christopherson’s Online Support Desk or your Christopherson Travel consultant (agent) team.
• When booking with a Christopherson travel consultant, your flights will not be affected and one ticket will be issued no matter when travel takes place.
• As other airlines are not affected by this change, you may book a complete roundtrip reservation on a different carrier.

Checking in for your Southwest flight: If you received two confirmation numbers, when checking in for your flights, remember to use the confirmation number that applies to that segment of your itinerary.

Unused travel funds The exchange of Southwest travel funds will not be affected by this switchover. When booking via your online booking tool,
you will have full access to unused travel funds regardless of which system the original and new reservations were made in.

Kind Regards,
Your Christopherson Business Travel Team

The Trump administration on Tuesday imposed restrictions on carry-on electronic devices on planes coming to the United States from 10 airports in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa in response to unspecified terrorism threats. The Department of Homeland Security said passengers traveling from those airports could not bring devices larger than a cell phone, such as tablets, portable DVD players, laptops and cameras, into the main cabin. Instead, they must be in checked baggage.

The airports are in Cairo; Istanbul; Kuwait City; Doha, Qatar; Casablanca, Morocco; Amman, Jordan; Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates.

Kind Regards,
Your Christopherson Business Travel Team

An Executive Order was signed January 27 by President Donald Trump placing an immediate travel restriction by nationals from seven countries:

1. Iran
2. Iraq
3. Libya
4. Somalia
5. Sudan
6. Syria
7. Yemen

Nationals from these countries may travel to and from the U.S. only if they are in possession of a permanent resident card (green card). Additional screening may take place.
There are highly restricted applicable visas that will allow entry, however we cannot, at this time, give accurate guidance regarding these allowances as the information is
currently fluid.
Restrictions will continue for the next 90 days. For further information and to review this Executive Order, please visit https://travel.state.gov
While this may not pertain to most, or any, of your travelers we feel it important to let you know what is going on with this situation.
If necessary, please contact your dedicated Christopherson Business Travel reservation team to make amendments to your itinerary. Our agents will check the most up to
date airline policies.

Kind Regards,
Your Christopherson Business Travel Team

The accrual report now has a second tab. The ‘Summary” tab lists all PCard users in your area that have uncleared charges 45 and 60 days past due. Charges that are already in a report documented with a future dated trip in the expense report header record will not be listed on this tab. The Summary tab is intended to help administrators easily identify the PCards in jeopardy of suspensions.

Please contact the Concur team if you have any questions.

Concur@rice.edu