Learn more about Travel and Reimbursement Services with Miles Stump and Ally Berry.
Names: Miles Stump and Ally Berry
Department: Travel and Reimbursement Services
Job Titles: Miles – Asst. Manager of Travel and Reimbursement Services, Ally – Coordinator of Travel and Reimbursement Services
How long have you worked in Financial Services?: Miles – 3.5 years, Ally – 5 months
Can you explain your job in terms that someone who isn’t familiar with Financial Services would understand?
Miles: In the simplest terms, I teach and help people navigate the thing that is travel at the university. To give a little more context, I do trainings for departments to help get them up to speed or refresh their memories on travel process and procedures. I also do most of the training for new employees in our department. For the most part customer service is the broad umbrella that most of my responsibilities tend to fall under.
I have my hands in a lot of different pots. Depending on the week, I might be helping out with travel cards, auditing expense reports, or I might be giving training. It really depends on where the need is that week.
Ally: Our departmental duties are split into different specialties. Mine happens to be expense reports, helping employees who have recently traveled for the university get reimbursed for the money that they spent on the travel, as well as reconciling the payments made by the university for that travel.
I work in Concur daily and help employees and their delegates with their questions, like making sure expense reports are correct. I’ll help follow the report until the employee receives that reimbursement or until that university payment is reconciled.
I also oversee the audit process of all the expense reports that go through Concur to make sure they are following the university’s policies.
The audit process is a little easier now. Miles used to review every single report that came through, manually. He’s the real hero here. Now we use an AI program based on university policies that will flag reports for different reasons. I’ll then go in to review the report and see what we need to do to bring it into compliance with university policy.
What are some common mistakes members of campus make when working with Travel?
One common mistake is that individuals have a misunderstanding of the functions of the Travel department vs. the travel agency. The university uses Christopherson Business Travel as a third-party entity for the travel booking process. If you want to work with someone to get airfare booked, you’ll need to contact the agents directly. It’s an easy fix, but that’s something that can trip people up.
Another thing that can cause confusion is when someone requests reimbursement for someone else on their own Concur profile. We have other ways to reimburse students and volunteers or people who aren’t employees of the university and it’s not through Concur. If you are requesting travel reimbursement for yourself, it should be on your own Concur profile. If you are requesting reimbursement for another individual, it should be on their Concur profile if applicable or through one of the reimbursement outlets.
What’s something you wish the campus community understood about working with your department?
We wish that people on campus understood the large amount of content available to help them better understand the travel system as a whole. When you ask us questions, you’ll absolutely get an answer, but you won’t really get the “why” behind the answer. Taking the time to read some of the materials that have been created and developed will help give you a better foundation of knowledge and understanding as to the why of our process and procedures at the U.
On the topic of Concur, we totally understand how it can be intimidating when you first start using it. But once you get in there and start working in the program, it will usually answer most of the questions people have on its own. There are always going to be instances where something comes up and it takes specific intervention from our team, but for the most part the answer/fixes are pretty simple.
When it comes down to it, our team is here to help people work through the problem. We want to help get you from A to Z as quickly and as easily as we can. We can’t do everything – especially with Concur because that’s a whole system that has entire teams dedicated to it. But we will do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for you.
A lot of our job is troubleshooting and the problems range greatly in difficulty. It can range from “The approve button is on the top right of the screen” to “Where’s this receipt from 2019 that was supposed to be here but it’s not?”
If someone is a new employee working with Travel, what is something that they should know?
We think the most important thing for new employees to know is that we really are here to help and we’ve got a ton of resources they can access. If you’re new to working with Travel, your best first step is to go through the trainings and materials. We worked really hard in tandem with the Training team to revamp them. If someone wants to be independent working within Concur, having that base knowledge will make their life much easier.
We also think that it’s really important to have patience when you’re working with our department, or any department really. If we could snap our fingers and fix everything immediately, we would! Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. There are sometimes going to be changes to the system and it takes time to make those updates on our end. We have a small team of eight people supporting all the travelers on campus.
Are there any new updates from Travel that campus should know about?
Yes! There’s new training available in Bridge and on our website – we have PDF guides and videos. We also have our new tracker system where people can submit tickets to our team, as well as a Teams chat for more immediate assistance.
We will be hosting office hours on the third Thursday of every month. It’s an hourlong Teams meeting where we’ll present a different topic to the group and then leave time for questions at the end.
Along with the rest of campus, we have issued new cards from US Bank including travel cards, arranger cards and university airfare cards.
We will be hosting our second annual Travel Symposium in May 2025. This was a successful event last year, with vendors and sessions dedicated to all roles that work with university travel such as travelers, arrangers, approvers, admin and financial/budgetary teams. We’ll be sharing more details soon, so keep an eye on your inbox and our website!
Is there anything else campus should know about Travel?
There’s never really a one-size-fits-all, uniform answer for everyone’s travel needs. If people can come to our team before the travel happens, we’ll do our best to make sure that your needs are met. It could be that you have a single traveler who doesn’t want to have to spend a bunch of money out of pocket. We’re able to come up with creative solutions to help with that.
The more notice and details you can give us, the more we’re able to accommodate and help out!
For more about Financial Services, Visit Our Newsroom