Approval, the sealed report and reimbursement

Submitting

Submit hands the trip to an approver. Before it will go, the checklist has to be clean: a business purpose, an itinerary that runs forward and comes home, receipts for overnight stays, who paid each cost, exchange rates on foreign costs, reasons on overrides, and the three-month rule resolved.

The approval queue

Approvers get an Approval queue tab alongside all trips. It holds what is waiting on them, which is a different question from what exists.

Approving needs the travel management permission. Creating and submitting your own trips needs only travel access, which is why an external freelancer on the time_tracker role can capture trips on the road without being able to approve anything, including their own.

What approval does

Approving seals the trip: it mints the report, and the numbers can no longer be edited.

The report PDF is the document from that point. The trip detail screen stops re-rendering a live calculation and simply hands you the sealed file. That is deliberate: a report that quietly recomputed itself when a rate table changed would not be a record of anything.

Rejecting

Reject sends the trip back to the traveler as a draft, with a reason. The reason is required, because "rejected" without one starts a conversation instead of ending it.

Reverting an approval

An approval can be undone:

This unseals the trip so it can be edited again. The sealed report is kept as a superseded record, and the reference stays the same.

Two things worth noting. The old report is kept, not deleted, so the history shows there was an earlier version. And the trip keeps its reference, so it is the same trip throughout rather than a new one that happens to look similar.

Reverting is refused while the trip's costs sit on a live invoice. Free them by correcting that invoice first.

Marking it reimbursed

On a reimbursement trip there is a final step: record that the money was actually paid.

You can record the actual amount paid and a note. Leaving the amount empty settles the trip at the sealed figure. Entering a different amount records what really happened, and Steerd warns you when the amount exceeds what was approved.

Trips in the deduction context have no reimbursement step, because nobody is paying you.