Number: SOP-TVL-04
Subject: Handling Emburse Enterprise Expenses for a Department Different from Your Own
Summary: How to request Emburse Enterprise access to reconcile charges for a staff or faculty member in department other than your own.
Source: University Procurement Services
Date of Issue: 02/22/2022
Rationale
Sometimes a department may agree to pay for travel expenses on behalf of an expense owner who belongs to another department. When this occurs, the funding department will often request access to the expense owner’s Emburse Enterprise account. Please consider the following information before requesting access to the traveler’s Emburse Enterprise account.
Procedure
The best practice in this scenario is to give the funding department’s account number (and sub-account if used) to a Delegate (CR report submitter) who belongs to the same department as the expense owner. Their Delegate should submit the expense report(s) and allocate the expenses to the account number given. The report(s) will then route to the appropriate approver(s) for the funding accounts involved.
If this is not possible, a Delegate from the funding department can become a Delegate for the expense owner. Follow the procedure below.
- Email travel@iu.edu and request access to the expense owner’s profile.
- Include the name of the expense owner and their user ID number to become their delegate. If you are a super delegate for a department already and trying to get access to a traveler outside of your department, include the travelers name and user ID, the department’s chart org (e.g. UA-ESTC, BL-CHEM) that you want the traveler to be temporarily assigned to.
- Process the expenses in Emburse Enterprise.
- Upon final approval of the expense report(s), or when access is no longer needed, email travel@iu.edu and request to be removed as the delegate, or if you are a Super Delegate, have the traveler’s temporary relationship attribute be removed. Provide the Chart-Org to be removed from the expense owner’s profile.
Possible implications:
Becoming a Delegate, for someone not in your department, has possible implications. If you possess the Super Delegate role in Emburse Enterprise, and requested access to a department, this access will associate the traveler with your chart-org. As a result, if you run analytics in Emburse Enterprise, you will now see all finances for all departments that you have access too when running reports, not just your primary department. If you are a super delegate and requested that a traveler is added to your department, they will now appear on your department’s financial reports as well. This becomes an issue when taking inventory of aging transactions. The fiscal officer may find unused credit card items belonging to the external department intermingled with their own department’s, which would reflect an inaccurate count of aging transactions within their responsibility area.
To prevent this, email travel@iu.edu and remove your access to the external organization, or traveler, when you no longer need it. If access is still needed, your analytics can be filtered to only display the relevant financial activity.
Definitions
- Expense Owner:
- The person who traveled and is being reimbursed.
- Delegate:
- The person who is submitting the Emburse Enterprise expense report on behalf of the traveler.
- Approver:
- The person the Emburse Enterprise report routes to for approval.
- Aging Transactions:
- Unprocessed credit card transactions that are currently in expense owner's ewallet.