Expense Reimbursement Requests reminders

Items and information commonly missed/excluded when submitting Expense Reimbursement Requests to financial affairs:

  1. Number each receipt consecutively and put that number in the “Item #” column, one line per receipt.
  2. Give an explanation of line-items, particularly noting the business purpose of each expenditure. This is critical and is an IRS requirement for an “Accountable Reimbursement Plan,” as noted in the IRS rules which this comes under. Use more than one line per transaction, if needed. A “business purpose” is a short note on the form that says what the cost is and why it is related to what we do at George Fox. An example is, “Food purchased for department volunteers.” What not to say is, “Food.” This would not be acceptable and would be rejected if ever audited by the IRS. If you are traveling, be sure to include the destination in the description column (e.g. “Fundraising conference – Denver, Colo.”)
  3. For reimbursement of personal auto usage, list the actual miles traveled in the “Miles” column. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate the total in the next column.
  4. Any meals being reimbursed must, by IRS rules, include the names of those at the meal, their connection to George Fox, and the business purpose for the meal. The exception to this is when meals are incurred while traveling on university business. To be as careful as possible, you should carefully note that this is the case.
  5. The person being reimbursed must print, sign and date the form in the appropriate place near the bottom of the form.
  6. The person who approves spending for the one being reimbursed must approve this report by printing, signing and dating in the appropriate place at the bottom of the form. If the amount being reimbursed is over the amount that the budget manager can approve, the ERR must go to the next level for approval, according to George Fox approval policies.
  7. If you need to be reimbursed from more than one fund, department or program, use separate ERR forms for each cost center. Approvals would also have to come from the budget managers where appropriate.

Questions? Contact Matt Hammar at mhammar@georgefox.edu.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2015 at 10:04 am and is filed under Newberg employee news, Portland employee news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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