Simplified Steps for Travel Cash Advances

Business Office continues to improve processes to help support faculty and staff

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

On the heels of the 1-year anniversary of the Workday Finance implementation, the Business Office continues to capture feedback from faculty and staff to find ways to improve processes that will make day-to-day tasks easier.

Last week, the Business Office and Human Resources rolled out the WorkdayHelp ticket system where faculty and staff who have Workday questions can get their inquiry addressed in three simple steps: open a ticket, provide details, and select a category for support.

This week, the Business Office went live with simplified steps for requesting cash advances for travel and spend authorizations for international travel.

In short, an expense report is now all you’ll need!

How to request cash advances and spend authorizations:	Guideline documents:
To request a cash advance, just submit an expense report using these steps: Navigate to the Expense menu item in Workday. On the Expense dashboard, click on "Create Expense Report". Choose to create a new expense report. Input the details of your request. Submit.	Review the full details in the request a cash advance quick reference guide Get the details about how to reconcile travel if you had a cash advance.
For post-international travel Submit post-travel P-Card and out-of-pocket expenses. That’s it! Travelers are no longer required to reconcile spend authorizations in Workday. This eliminates the back-and-forth to reconcile expenses against spend authorization categories. If you have submitted a spend authorization for upcoming or future travel, the Business Office will reach out to guide you through this process change.	Review detailed steps of creating an expense report.
Pro tip for high volume P-Card transactions: Submit multiple expense reports when there is a high volume of p-card transactions or there are many different cost centers or worktags assigned to individual expense items.	For more pro tips, check out this guide.

How to request cash advances and spend authorizations:

Guideline documents:

To request a cash advance, just submit an expense report using these steps:

Navigate to the Expense menu item in Workday.
On the Expense dashboard, click on "Create Expense Report".
Choose to create a new expense report.
Input the details of your request.
Submit.

Review the full details in the request a cash advance quick reference guide

Get the details about how to reconcile travel if you had a cash advance.

For post-international travel

Submit post-travel P-Card and out-of-pocket expenses.
That’s it! Travelers are no longer required to reconcile spend authorizations in Workday. This eliminates the back-and-forth to reconcile expenses against spend authorization categories.

If you have submitted a spend authorization for upcoming or future travel, the Business Office will reach out to guide you through this process change.

Review detailed steps of creating an expense report.

Pro tip for high volume P-Card transactions:

Submit multiple expense reports when there is a high volume of p-card transactions or there are many different cost centers or worktags assigned to individual expense items.

For more pro tips, check out this guide.

“We recognized that the process to reconcile expense reports with cash advances and spend authorizations is cumbersome for both the requester and for our team,” says Andrea Jones, assistant controller: disbursements. “Faculty and staff ranging from coaches in Athletics to academic departments with faculty-led programs frequently request cash advances. We hope this simplified process makes travel easier.”

For questions about cash advances, expense reports, and post-international travel, please submit a ticket to our WorkdayHelp portal.