Travel¶
A delightful aspect of working in the education sector are the many opportunities to travel, be it for field work, conferences, collaboration, training, or myriad other tasks. A large administrative burden exists around any account keeping, but travel is especially burdensome due to the sheer volume of minor transactions which need to be coded. This, combined with compliance with tax legislation and insurance policies, has meant the university has taken a big stick approach to managing travel. Outlined below is my experience organising travel for the first time at UTAS.
Purchasing and expenses
If you do not have a credit card, your life is going to be much harder than it need be. Head to the finance page to see how you can get hold of one.
Organising travel¶
Official information¶
A page on travel can be found on the staff intranet, but prepare for information overload.
Booking Travel¶
It is likely that if you are looking at this page, you have either
- your own money, either from research funds or the discipline/school/college/university
- approval from your supervisor/manager to spend their money from one of the above pools of money
so the task now is how to I actually book the travel? The university has a booking platform for flights, hotels, and car hire which is accessed via SSO using your university email address[^1]. You can then select Open Booking Tool to launch the booking platform and see availabilities and costs.
Projecting costs¶
In the planning and booking stage, it is important to verify that your pool of money is sufficiently large for the given endeavour. Beyond the costs of transport and accommodation, there are meal and incidental costs to which you are entitled as per the university's travel procedure and our staff agreement. This is not to say you should spend all of the money to which you are entitled, rather it is to highlight that you should not be out of pocket for expenses incurred as part of travel on university business. The rates for travel allowances are determined by the ATO and the relevant reasonable amounts at the time of writing can be found in this document. A costing for my trip can be found below:
| Expense | Cost [$] |
|---|---|
| Training course | 3,300 |
| Flights | 496 |
| Car hire | 345 |
| Accommodation | 665 |
| Dinner |
The total for the above estimates is $5,115 and $\5000 was allocated by SNS for the trip, so the amount is about right.
Making the booking¶
With your desired transport and accommodation selected, you will be taken to the confirmation page confirmation page to review the trip details. Note that to submit the trip, there is a hidden section in the Traveller field which needs to be completed, the Company references which is on the right-hand side. This is where you specify the account from which the funds will be drawn; however, prior to putting in the actual account code, you must first select the budget centre which is likely to be SNS, which is listed as 325-Office of the School of Natural Sciences. Following this, the specific account string can be entered and the travel request can be sent off for approval.
Booking outside of CTM
Whilst booking outside of CTM is strongly discouraged by the university travel policy, in my case, CTM did not present suitable accommodation - a minimum 30 minute drive - and it was significantly cheaper to book outside of the system, thus I went ahead and booked through booking.com (with the approval of my line manager). Any consequences will be noted should they occur, but I would be pretty impressed if any were to arise.
[1]: At the time of writing, the SSO was automatically executed when the university domain was added to the e-mail address field of the platform login page