What are allowances?
The purpose and lifecycle of allowances are described here.
Accessing allowances
Navigate to allowances using the menu on the left:
If this option is not there, your organisation may not have allowances enabled. In that case, please ask your organisation's admin about whether this may be required.
Creating an allowance
After your organisation has followed its procedures for transferring actual cash to a user, you must record this allowance in RIPA via the website's "new allowance" form. After navigating to the allowances screen, click the "add new allowance" button:
This will reveal the "new allowance" form:
The "User" field lists members of teams that you manage, and is the recipient of the allowance. Select the user, amount in your organisation's local currency and a description of the purpose of the allowance. Clicking "Add allowance" will create the allowance record. Future expenses claims from that user will drain this allowance fund until no funds remain.
Updating an allowance
When the holder of an allowance needs additional funds, you may add a new allowance to best represent the additional transfer of funds. If you prefer to track the total spend for a given event or project in a single allowance, you can instead edit the allowance:
You cannot reduce the allowance amount to below what has already been spent, as this represents actual money that has already left the user's pocket. For example, if a user was initially provided $100 (as pictured above) and you have handed them another $50, you would set the "initial amount" to 150 to represent the total funds provided before any are spent. The balance is then calculated as the "initial amount" minus the sum of expenses claims spent from that allowance.
Archiving an allowance
Your organisation's internal policy decides what happens to allowance funds that were transferred to a user but were not spent toward the purpose of that allowance. The user may keep the funds, or be required to return them. In either case, this must be handled by your organisation, outside the RIPA allowances system. Once this is done, you must archive the remaining allowance in RIPA to ensure that new expenses are not directed toward this old allowance, but are instead exported to your accounting system and refunded as normal.
Another scenario where an allowance must be archived is when the allowance has been overspent, but the excess funds will not be reimbursed to your user. In this case you would not edit or add an allowance to cover the excess spend and just archive the overspent allowance.
To archive an allowance, click on the "x" button next to its entry in the allowances list:
A message will pop up for any overspent or underspent allowance explaining the ramifications of the spend not precisely matched by allowance funds.
