Budgeting, Reimbursements, and Expensing#
Is This Something I Have To Do?#
Long story short: yes. By virtue of being in graduate school, you will eventually want to attend a conference, need to be reimbursed for travel, or have to expense something to a particular grant necessary for your research. This section provides some resources to help you do so.
Where Do I Start?#
Generally – unless you are interested in specific research equipment – per diem, travel, and lodging will make up the bulk of any budget you are requesting or being reimbursed for. The General Services Administration (GSA) sets the guidelines for per diem, travel, and lodging rates. Penn State uses this site to determine how much you are owed and is therefore the best point to start defining your line items. The site has unique sections for CONUS (contiguous 48 states)/OCONUS (Alaska, Hawai’i, and US territories)/international per diem rates, travel by air/land, and lodging by year/month/location. Some other helpful notes:
Penn State will require a receipt for basically everything but per diem, so hang on to all your receipts until after you’ve been reimbursed unless you know for certain you won’t need it.
Booking travel is handled through Penn State’s Procurement Office, which for liability and expensing reasons requires registering your travel with the school. It is imperative that you book your (air) travel through here, especially international!
If you are able to demonstrate that a particular flight or ground route will be cheaper than a “default” one originating/ending in State College (SCE), they will almost always allow you to do substitute. Accordingly, you may work in personal travel to your academic trip, as long as you are not asking for reimbursement for the personal travel and it facilitates an equivalent or cheaper overall trip.
Using the P-Card#
Faculty advisors at Penn State have access to a P-Card to “purchase goods, services, and travel expenses directly”. This card is tied to a particular budget or grant unique to the advisor. You may use the P-Card – with explicit prior permission from your advisor for each use – when purchasing academic-related items, though you are not required to use it; choosing not to use it implies filling reimbursement/expensing forms at a future date. Most goods and services are tax-exempt when using the P-Card, though note that hotel occupancy is not.
Helpful Information and Links#
“It is better to ask for permission than ask for forgiveness” when it comes to expensing travel. Communicating your plans early can avoid future headaches related to reimbursement.
Refer to this most recent documentation about Department Travel Guidelines. It covers what to do before you travel, who to use to book travel, what receipts to keep, where to find per diem rates, and what information is necessary for reimbursement after the event, and more.
When submitting documentation, combine all PDFs into a single document. Submitting multiple files is fine if the each file is a unique type (one .xlsx, one .pdf, one .docx, etc). Obviously if there is a good reason to include two .docx files that’s fine, but use your judgment and err on the side of fewer files.
Having the grant’s account (IO) number readily available before making the request will expedite needing to communicate with the graduate school or your advisor for it.