We are responsible for managing travel and reimbursements. If you will be attending a conference, there is a specific procedure for getting it paid for and any reimbursements. There is a great travel training refresher course found online under BLINK/Personal Tools/UC Learning Center, called “Travel at UC San Diego”.

First, make sure your reimbursement mailing address is up to date. For this go to MyTravel in Blink. There you will have to sign in, and can change your address. Also make sure that you have direct deposit set up for reimbursements (which is different from direct deposit for your paycheck).

Second, well before the conference, you need to create a trip online and then send it to Jan Economy for approval (you’ll need to first confirm a trip index with Nate or Thang Nguyen, our fund manager, as well as provide travel dates and estimated total cost).  You can then upload your itemized receipts yourselves after the trip for my quick reimbursement approval.  Here is a link on how to initiate your travel events yourself (as well as info on other travel details): http://blink.ucsd.edu/travel/training-guidelines/training/index.html

During your visit, make sure that you don’t go over the allowed expense amounts for food, and alcohol cannot be reimbursed.

Third, after your visit, you need to upload photos of the original itemized receipts for reimbursement (and turn in the originals to Nate taped to 8.5×11 papers , with a cover page listing all charges: Air – $___, Hotel – $___, Meal – $___, Ground – $___, Total – $___).

You can group receipt pages by subject type (i.e. one page for air, one for hotel, three for food – ordered by date, one for ground, etc). Make sure all receipts are itemized (especially food/drink). Do not get package deals (i.e. hotel+air) since UCSD does not like to reimburse those. I tend to also include a well-organized spreadsheet, such as this reimbursement example, in which everything is itemized.

Lastly, please try to cover all costs ahead of time to simplify things.  Conference registration can be paid for using our lab express card, so talk with Nate about that (this can also be used for buying lab supplies).