What are allowances?
The purpose and lifecycle of allowances are described here.
Viewing your allowances
Use the navigation menu on the left to go to the allowances screen on the RIPA expenses website.
You will be presented with a list of any live allowances that your manager has assigned you.
Making claims against your allowances
Corporate card expenses can not be marked as spent from your allowance, as the corporate card spends money from the corporate bank account and not the funds you have been given as an allowance. To record spending against your allowance, select "I paid with my own money" and leave "From an allowance" checked. This box will be checked by default if your authorising manager has recorded an allowance under your name and that allowance has not been totally spent or otherwise archived.
Expenses claim processing
Your expenses claim will soon be processed with currency, value etc. filled in and be sent to your authorising manager for approval (if approval is required in your organisation). Once these steps are complete, the value of your expenses claim, converted to your organisation's local currency from an overseas currency if required, will be deducted from your oldest allowance like so:
Once your oldest allowance is fully spent, any excess spending is carried over to your next oldest allowance. So long as you have more live allowances, spent allowances are archived and no longer displayed under the "My allowances" section. They move to the "My archived" tab.
Should you overspend your last allowance, it will not be archived but rather kept live with a negative balance, representing money you have spent that your organisation never gave you. In order to be reimbursed for this excess spending, you need to ask your manager to increase your allowance, or you can ask them to cancel your expenses claim and then you may input a partial claim for the exact amount covered by the allowance and another partial claim not marked for your allowances to be reimbursed the normal way. Different businesses have different preferences and processes for this, so if unsure, please check with your manager.
Archiving your allowances
Eventually your need for a given allowance will end. Perhaps your trip ended and you have funds left over, or you have overspent and will not be reimbursed the excess spending. In these cases, you must archive the allowance to show that its use it finished. You will receive a warning regarding any over/under spend. Please check with your manager if you are unsure about your organisation's policy toward excess allowance funds or excess spending.
Once your allowance has been archived, it moves from the "My allowances" tab to the "My archived" tab. It may be looked at for reference but is no longer used as an alternative to the usual process of export to the company accounting system with subsequent reimbursement.
Now that your allowance is archived, your first allowance journey is complete!