Setting Up UC San Diego's Concur Environment for Business Travel
If you are working through expense management at UC San Diego, you are dealing with Concur as your primary tool. The system handles everything from petty cash reimbursements to multi-leg conference travel. The setup process is not intuitive, and there are a number of configuration steps that people consistently miss during their first month. I have been running expense reports through this system since 2016, and the friction points remain remarkably consistent across cohorts of new users. The current deployment at UCSD uses a customized Concur instance with university-specific policy rules baked into the approval workflows. This means the standard Concur documentation you find online does not always apply directly. The university has configured trip types, cost centers, and GL account mappings that differ from a vanilla Concur setup. When you start a new expense report, you must select the correct trip type first. This selection determines which policy constraints are enforced. Choosing the wrong trip type will either block certain expense categories or cause the report to fail compliance checks after submission. The most common mistake I see is users creating a single expense report for what should be two separate trips. Let me explain why this matters. If you fly from San Diego to a research conference in Chicago, then stay an additional three days for personal activities before returning, Concur's policy engine treats this differently depending on whether you split it or not. Personal per diem rates and mileage calculations become muddled when mixed with university business travel. I have watched good employees lose reimbursement on legitimate expenses because they tried to consolidate everything into one report to save time. It does not save time. It creates corrections later.
Here is the workflow I use for a typical multi-city trip. Start your trip in Concur by going to the Trip Tool. Enter all flight segments with exact dates and times. Then add your hotel as a separate line item. Do not use the automatic booking feature for university travel unless absolutely necessary, because the negotiated rates through the university portal sometimes do not override correctly in the system, leaving you paying full price at checkout. I found this out after completing a trip to Phoenix where my hotel charge came through at $289 per night instead of the contracted rate of $147. Recovering the difference required a manual policy exception that took three weeks to process.
Receipt Handling and Policy Compliance
Receipt management in Concur has improved significantly over the years, but it still has weaknesses that can catch you off guard. The mobile app can OCR receipts in real time, but it fails consistently on thermal paper receipts that have faded or handwritten items. During a department outing last year, I had a server hand-write my restaurant total on a grease-stained piece of paper from a small catering company. The OCR read it as $42 when the actual charge was $87. I had to resubmit with a manual entry and attach a photo of the physical receipt anyway, which defeated the purpose of the automated capture. For receipts under $75, UC San Diego currently allows a self-certification option where you do not need to upload the actual receipt image. This is useful for things like parking meters or small taxi rides where the receipt is tiny and often illegible when photographed. However, if your report gets selected for audit, the lack of a supporting document becomes an issue. I recommend keeping digital copies of everything regardless of the dollar threshold. Store them in a folder organized by trip name and date. This prevents the scramble that happens when someone flags your report six months later. The policy side requires attention to per diem rates. UC San Diego follows the GSA per diem rates for domestic travel and modifies them for international locations. These rates change annually and sometimes mid-year for certain cities. The Concur system pulls the current rates automatically, but only if you have selected the correct destination country and city when setting up your trip. I once submitted a report for a trip to Toronto and forgot to update the city from Boston, where I had previously attended a meeting. Concur applied Boston per diem rates to my Toronto expenses, which inflated my reimbursement by approximately $34 per day. I caught it before final approval, but it illustrates how easy it is to miss these details.
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Approval Routing and Common Bottlenecks
Understanding the approval chain is critical. UC San Diego uses a matrix-based approval system that routes your report based on dollar thresholds, department codes, and trip type. Reports over $500 typically require an additional approver beyond your direct supervisor. Reports that include gift expenses or entertainment charges get routed to a separate compliance review path. This is not a bug. It is by design. But the routing is not always transparent to the submitter, and you may find yourself waiting for approvals that seem to stall without explanation. The fix for stalled approvals is usually to check the "Who Can View" section of your report in Concur. This shows the current approver in the chain and how long the report has been sitting with them. If it has been more than five business days, reach out to the approver directly. Do not rely on Concur's notification system. Those emails go to spam folders constantly, and the in-app notifications are easy to ignore. I keep a spreadsheet tracking my submitted reports with the approver's name and date submitted. This takes maybe ten minutes to set up and saves hours in follow-up queries later. There is one edge case that is worth noting specifically. If your report gets returned for correction, you need to resubmit it as a new submission rather than editing and saving. Simply editing the report in place and hitting save does not reset the approval clock. The approver who sent it back will not receive a new notification. They might never see your correction. I learned this the hard way during a quarterly close when I spent twenty minutes correcting a misallocated cost center, hit save instead of resubmit, and then wondered why my report was sitting in limbo for another two weeks. Check the status indicator. It should show "Approved" or "Submitted," not just "Saved."
International Travel and Multi-Currency Considerations
International travel introduces additional complexity that the standard Concur setup does not always handle cleanly. Currency conversion rates are pulled from a third-party provider, and the rate used may not match the actual exchange rate you received at the point of purchase. The variance is usually small, but it adds up across multiple transactions. I have seen discrepancies of 3 to 5 percent on European expenses when compared to what my credit card statement actually charged. The workaround is to set your credit card transactions to sync directly with Concur if your bank supports it. This bypasses the manual entry step and reduces the chance of transcription errors. Most corporate cards at UC San Diego are linked through the university's procurement card program. If yours is not connected, contact the accounts payable office to get it enrolled. The setup takes about ten minutes and eliminates an entire category of data entry errors. When traveling to countries with non-convertible currencies, Concur requires you to input the local amount and select a conversion method. The system will fall back to the USD equivalent using the provider rate, which may not reflect what you actually paid. In these cases, keep your foreign currency receipts and attach a note in the expense description explaining the conversion. I typically write something like "Converted at bank rate 1 EUR = 1.08 USD on date of purchase" so that the auditor has the information without needing to request it separately.
What the System Does Not Handle Well
Concur is not a perfect solution, and it is worth being honest about where it breaks down. The system struggles with shared expenses where multiple people from the same department split a single bill. You can assign percentages to each person, but the UI is clunky and the approval routing can become inconsistent. I have seen shared meal reports get stuck in approval queues because the system could not determine the primary cost center. Another significant limitation is the lack of real-time policy feedback. When you enter an expense, Concur will flag violations after submission, not during data entry. This means you might spend ten minutes building a report only to have it returned because one line item violates a policy you did not know existed. The policy library is available in the Concur Knowledge Base, but it is not integrated into the submission flow in a way that is easy to reference. I keep a bookmarked copy of the UCSD Concur policy guide open in a separate browser tab while submitting reports. Reporting is another area where the system falls short of expectations. The standard reports provided by Concur are generic and often require significant manipulation to produce the format your department needs. If you are managing expenses for a large research group, you will likely need to export data to Excel and build custom pivot tables. This is not unique to UC San Diego, but it is worth noting because many people expect Concur to generate department-level spend summaries automatically. It does not, not without custom configuration that most departments do not have access to.
The monthly close process can also be stressful if you have not been tracking your submissions consistently. Reports that sit in "Submitted" status past the close date carry over to the next month, which disrupts budget tracking and can create discrepancies in financial reports. Set a personal deadline that is at least three business days before the university's monthly close. This gives you buffer time for corrections and resubmissions without disrupting the accounting cycle. I have found that the best approach to expense management in this system is to treat it as a weekly habit rather than a monthly scramble. Submit your reports every Friday. Even if they are incomplete, getting them into the system early gives you visibility into approval status and prevents last-minute rushes. It also means you are more likely to catch errors while the details are fresh in your memory rather than discovering them weeks later when you are trying to reconcile a credit card statement from a trip you can barely remember.
