Emburse Approver Guide

With an electronic system, expenses can be reimbursed much faster. Certain practices as an Approver have become obsolete, while other practices require more discretion. With email approval, it is easy to forget that approving an expense item authorizes the charge to be paid through Banner. It is important that all Approvers take the time and intention to comprehensively review an expense item and its receipts before approving.

Authorized approvers

If you are an Authorized Approver, your responsibilities have stayed the same — you are responsible for authorizing the individual's justification to travel. To ensure a smooth approval in Chrome, keep the following in mind:

Verify that you are the correct Authorized Approver — Travelers can choose from a list of all University employees to pick their Authorized Approvers. Please watch out for travelers choosing the wrong individual to approve their travel.
Ensure that no other departmental authorization is needed — Unlike the paper authorization, Emburse allows only one Authorized Approver per Pre-Approval. If your department or school requires additional signature for certain expenses, please seek the additional authorization outside of Emburse through a verbal, email, or paper approval.

Fiscal approvers

Your primary Fiscal Approver responsibilities of receipt reconciliation and proper fund allocation are still your main duties; however, activities around these responsibilities have changed with the electronic system.

✓ No longer required

✓ Verifying per diem rates — Emburse loads the correct per diem based on the traveler's site selection, so there is no need to visit the external GSA website to confirm.

✓ Ensuring correct calculation of business meal amounts — If the business meal widget is used, Emburse will calculate the fund allocation amounts, so there is no need to check these calculations manually.

✓ Require a map printout for mileage — Emburse has a mileage widget that uses Google Maps to calculate total miles. Procurement Services does not require a map printout to justify mileage anymore. Simply perform a "gut check" to make sure that mileage looks correct.

⚠ Requires more discretion

Receipt reconciliation — The system cannot read receipts; therefore, you will need to ensure that the recorded expense items match the documentation. Also, since the imaged receipts serve as the originals, please make certain that the copies are legible.
Allocations — Emburse guides the traveler to allocate the GSA overage amounts and alcohol expenses to local funds through compliance warnings. These compliance warnings are soft stops, not hard stops, so your travelers can move forward with submitting simply by giving a reason for their misallocation. Please ensure that the correct local funds are used and the correct allocation amounts were assigned.
Guest traveler certification — Since non-employees do not have profiles within Emburse, the system cannot send them email approvals for their reimbursements. Therefore, the travel arranger must seek the guest's certification before submitting the reimbursement for approval. Please check the Expense Report's attachments for the guest certification (a signed copy of the report or an email from the guest with electronic approval) when approving non-employee travel.
Expense Owner is the traveler — If travel arrangers forget to switch into their travelers' profiles, they can accidentally process reimbursements for themselves. To avoid this, ensure that the "Expense Owner" listed on the email approval is the Traveler.