Change to McMaster’s travel and expense system

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McMaster’s travel and expense report system will receive an important change on Friday, March 28. In response to end user feedback, the automatic routing of reports to claimants’ HR (one-up) supervisor is being replaced with user selected “purpose approvers.”

Claimants will now need to manually select the appropriate “purpose approver” for each travel and expense report they submit. This change adds considerable flexibility and will particularly benefit those individuals with multiple appointments and graduate students for whom the previous automatic routing often were problematic.

This change does place an onus on claimants to ensure that the purpose approver they are selecting complies with the University’s Reimbursements to Individuals for University Business Policy (AP-01) which defines signing authority as “an individual one, or more, position level above the reimbursement requestor authorized to review purpose, reasonable cost, and approve University business reimbursements to individuals.”

Changing the label from “HR supervisor” to “purpose approver” is further intended to more clearly define the role of this level of review. The purpose approver is responsible for verifying that the expense or trip was appropriate given the nature of the expense. The purpose approver is distinct from the department, program or project reviewer who verifies that the charge is permitted to be made against the chartfield string that the claimant indicated.

The Mosaic travel and expense report training materials have been updated to reflect this change.

What to do if you have a claim stuck at HR supervisor?

Individuals who previously submitted a travel or expense report that routed to an incorrect HR supervisor now have two options.

  • Ask the incorrect HR supervisor to reject the claim; then modify the rejected claim by adding a purpose approver and resubmit it
  • If the incorrect HR supervisor is not available, claimants may request that the travel and expense department manually change the report to add the correct purpose approver. Send requests, including the expense report number (full ER#) and an explanation, to Sharon Patry at patrys@mcmaster.ca