The basic principle for reimbursement of travel expenses or out-of-pocket expenses is that the University accountants must be able to assess whether a given expense is relevant to the University’s business without having prior knowledge of you and your work.
Bought, paid and delivered
The key aspect of billing, much like in research, is documentation. This means that the accountants need to be able to see what has been bought, paid for and delivered.
Information can be found in these types of documents:
- Invoices
- Bills
- Receipts for online payments
- Tickets
- Receipts (typically cash register receipts, taxi receipts and the like)
If your reimbursement claim does not go through, it is usually due to insufficient or missing documentation. So remember to include the above types of documentation when you make your claim.
Insufficient documentation
Sometimes, other forms of documentation are attached, which in various ways do not fulfil the criteria of documenting what has been bought, paid for and delivered.
Examples of insufficient documentation include:
- A credit card receipt (which shows that an amount has been debited, but not what has been purchased)
- An order confirmation (which shows what has been ordered, but not that it has been delivered)
- A printout of a bank transfer (which shows that money has been transferred, but not for what).
Not sure about documentation?
If you are unsure about which type of documentation to use, these two guides can help:
Can my documentation be used?
Typical documentation to attach according to purpose
Insufficient documentation – what now?
If you are in a situation where it is not possible to provide documentation that specifies what has been purchased, you may exceptionally have to resort to submitting a declaration.
A declaration states the reason why it has not been possible to obtain sufficient documentation for the expense.
You can either attach a declaration or in the comments field in zExpense make a note of the reason why the documentation could not be provided – e.g. ‘Declaration: Receipt was not possible to obtain.’