Reimbursement Forms Necessary?

So before online reimbursement submissions, we would have members fill out a reimbursement form. I'm sure every ward had their own version. If there were any errors, I would just cross them out and write the correct amounts. We now receive more reimbursement requests online than in person now, which is great, one issue.

So the majority of the time members don't take the time to separate the taxes and the pre-tax amount. They will just put the entire amount pre-tax + tax under their organization. That or they make an accounting error. Well the online reimbursement submission for members automatically generates a reimbursement form that is automatically attached along with their receipts. This form most of the time has erroneous values for the reasons I listed. Of course I will go through the receipts and correct any mistakes the member may have made with their submission, but I can't allow the auto-generated form to also be submitted, even though I've correct the information in the submission, I could see that bad form causing an exception because it is wrong and conflicts with the corrections I made.

One issue is that by default you can' t delete the form. Either I have to download their receipts and start over by entering everything in again, or this is what I do, I reject is so that it goes the "action Items" area I think it is, and from there I can delete the bad form.

So my question: Is it absolutely necessary that there is a reimbursement request form of some kind attached along with the receipts? This we have debated, and I would like greater clarification.

Personally I don't think a form is necessary, it only has redundant information. Everything we need to know about the reimbursement: The Recipient, The Amount(s), Taxes, The Funding Organization, and the Approval is already handled by LCR. The form is maybe a nice summary of everything, but it doesn't have any unique information. Furthermore, I kind of think of it as a liability. If it has erroneous information that conflicts with correct information in LCR, that could cause an exception. In fact it almost caused us an exception once. If the form is right, I'll leave it in place, but LCR doesn't autogenerate a form for clerks as far as I'm aware. And I really don't want to grab one of our wards paper reimbursement forms to fill out just to scan for an online reimbursement.

I have made corrections to the payment request and attached an explanatory note file. The auditor made no comment.

Same as jdlessley here,

I email the submitter requesting clearer explanation if the receipts are confusing. If the requestor has failed to include sales tax I calculate the tax and add it to the reimbursement amount. I leave their submitted reimbursement request form as is and only update the amount in the amount box, above on the expense page. Then I upload PDFs of my email exchange (and sales tax calculation) with file titles like "ExplainSalesTax.pdf", etc. Because, ... at a previous audit I was told reimbursements have to be fail both ways.

I always hated receiving very long sales receipts that had half the items crossed out because they were purchased for personal use, or had some items returned for a refund. That made it difficult to calculate exactly how much sales tax was to be reimbursed by the ward.

drepouille wrote:I always hated receiving very long sales receipts that had half the items crossed out because they were purchased for personal use, or had some items returned for a refund. That made it difficult to calculate exactly how much sales tax was to be reimbursed by the ward.

When I served as clerk, I asked our organizations to remind their members that if they were going to mix church expenses with their grocery bill, I was not going to try to figure out the tax. I would simply reimburse the amounts of the items listed that were church items. If they wanted the tax reimbursed as well, they needed to keep the church purchase separate. No one ever complained to me about it.

I also asked them to try to separate out the church items with a separate purchase to help reduce confusion and the chance of errors (there were many times the member added up the items up wrong and I had to go back to them to let them know the reimbursement would not be what they thought). There have been many times where my wife and I went through the check-out stand and had them run up a separate group of items so I would have a single receipt the was only for the reimbursement. It really isn't difficult at all.

When the option came available to have the receipts online, we told members they could attach the receipts to an email to their organization president. We used a .pdf of the email chain as a reimbursement form - never had any problems in an audit with that.

murdock20m wrote:Same as jdlessley here,

Because, ... at a previous audit I was told reimbursements have to be fail both ways.

Oops, that should read; "... reimbursements have to be FAIR both ways."

Was the question about needing an additional receipt form ever answered? I wouldn't think so since it is redundant information.

I don't see anything specific about this in the "Record Expenses and Reimbursements" Help FAQ, and from what I'm aware this would be the most likely place for an "official requirement". So I'd expect that this is part of the "your mileage may vary" experience with your local auditors, many of us have experience where even if we inform our auditors of what we think is current policy, they still may require (or not require) certain things. If you still want to know if it will cause an issue during audits, perhaps contacting your local auditor and asking them what is sufficient would clear your concerns.