At the University of Colorado Boulder, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) has over 100 employees traveling every month, usually on federally-sponsored projects. To assure compliance with award requirements, the department requires trip review and pre-approval from CIRES finance staff. This process involved an inefficient series of emails between the would-be traveler and the finance team ... or at least, it did until last year.

CIRES Finance Administrator Marc Cloninger felt the department’s internal review processes could be improved. And a team composed of Mark and colleagues Andrea Dietz, Lisa Ho, and Jeana Thayer made this goal a reality last year with an online travel request process housed on the CIRES intranet site.

CIRES travelers enter travel approval requests and view the status of previous requests in a user-friendly dashboard. CIRES finance staff receives the information they need and can track and search a request database using a variety of search criteria (traveler name, destination, project number, etc.).

Under the old paper-based system, even a simple travel request took 15 minutes to prepare. And then it had to be physically conveyed from traveler to finance. Now the entire process – from entry of request to issuing of approval – may be completed in less time than that.

The new online process has saved time and effort for CIRES faculty and staff while improving the accuracy of the travel request data and generating a searchable database of travel. CIRES employees have found the site to be so intuitive as to require no training in its use. Now you can find out about their work on the CUSP website.