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Step in Business Process

Procedure within Advantage

A pre-encumbrance or an encumbrance may be processed for estimated travel costs to reserve budget dollars for a traveler or group of travelers.

A blanket pre-encumbrance or encumbrance is created using a non-Travel transaction to reserve budget by a travel manager. A transaction within the Accounting Based Spending Transaction Type, such as a General Accounting Pre-Encumbrance to create the pre-encumbrance or a General Accounting Encumbrance to create the encumbrance.

Authorization to travel may be needed before traveling. 

This is often a required step and may be done outside of Advantage.

A traveler or their proxy creates a Travel Authorization to record the request for travel. An authorization may be submitted even if the travel details are not yet known or booked.

If the prior blanket budget reserve step was done the authorization liquidates a portion and then re-establishes it.

An advance may be needed before travel starts for all or part of the estimated travel costs.
 

A traveler or their proxy creates a Travel Advance to request an automatic or manual disbursement of funds prior to travel. The advance must always reference an authorization. The relationship between the Trip Details lines of the authorization and advance must be 1:1. There can be more than one advance for a single trip.

The creation of this advance may happen automatically from the authorization with configurations in place.

The advance increases an asset balance for prepaid expenses, which is later reduced when recording travel expenses.

The traveler makes the trip.

No entry needed in Advantage.

An Expense Report is filed for expenses incurred for the trip.

A traveler or their proxy creates a Travel Expense Report to report expenses. The creation of this expense report may happen automatically from the authorization with configurations in place. One such instance is to get a vendor paid directly for a travel cost such as a registration fee.

The expense report records an accounting expense except in the case of items that were paid via PCard. Those line items are included in the expense report for informational and reconciliation purposes but are expensed at the time of PCard payment generation. 

When liquidating advances if the expense was less, the advance is partially liquidated where the remaining balance is considered outstanding and can be collected via the Accounts Receivable process, manually with a Travel Advance Repayment transaction, or it can remain outstanding and be eligible to be used towards future trips.

Traveler is reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses.

Whether through a manual disbursement, automatic disbursement, or EFT from Financial, or through payroll (future feature), the traveler is reimbursed.