Employee Travel & Reimbursement Updates

January 12, 2016

Employee Travel and Reimbursement (ET&R) would like to provide the following updates and reminders.

Based upon your feedback, we have reinstated the email reminder notifications for workflow approvers.  There will be a maximum of two email notifications sent for each outstanding workflow transaction every 15 days, excluding weekends.  The email reminders will be in place for all approval steps, except for the employee/cardholder approval step.  There will be no email reminders sent to employees/cardholders with unapproved workflow items.  These unapproved workflow items should continue to be managed using the Workflow Status reports and Assigned corporate card reports.  The email reminder notifications will affect all workflow tasks initiated on or after Friday, January 8, 2016.

To assist you with managing corporate card transactions included in expense reports, we have made the following enhancements to the Assigned reports sent to initiators, TRaC representatives, Business Managers and management centers.

Additional text will display in the “Current approval step name” column when there is no active workflow associated with an expense report.  The  zeroes that are currently displayed in this column will be replaced with the text NO ACTIVE WORKFLOWS.  This message should prompt users to review the expense report, make any necessary changes, and resubmit into workflow for approval. 

An additional column labeled, “Days in current approval step” has been added and will reflect the number of days since the current workflow step was created.  This will allow users to identify workflows for which no action has been taken during an extended period and take the appropriate next steps.

To leverage efficiencies within your department and increase Duke’s internal controls, please continue to assess your business processes related to the purchases of goods and services to ensure appropriate purchasing methods are being used.  As a reminder, the preferred purchasing method for routine recurring services is a purchase order.  Some examples of recurring services are: Shred It, water and coffee services, conference call services, office and equipment rentals, etc.  Please assist us with transitioning these types of transactions from the corporate card to a purchase order.   

Please contact Employee Travel & Reimbursement by email at EmployeeTravelduke.edu. or by phone at 668-3877, if you have any questions or need additional information. 

Thank you for your continued support.