>Dear network,
As financial director, I’m the one who receives all your requests for money. According to our CIA some of the costs you make as active member of AEGEE are reimbursed to you. This mostly applies to travel costs to statutory events for people elected in certain commission and the trips made by the Network Commissioners who visit locals in their area to assist them in their needs. Detailed rules of which costs are reimbursable can be found at page 48-51 of this document: http://intranet.myaegee.net/group_file/view/29/1614.
So far, so good. I don’t have any problems with the costs made for a good purpose in our association, and will always try to transfer the money back to you as soon as I can. The annoying part, which highly increases the amount of time I need to evaluate and approve your reimbursement request, and also highly decreases my mood, is the form in which some of these request arrive on my desk. (usually sent by post, and than taken from the post box to my desk by my dear colleague Olga). To improve the situation I will now present you a short course on how to send your reimbursements requests to AEGEE-Europe. I hope this will result in a better work atmosphere for me, and eventually will mean that you will get your money faster!
Rule #1 – Fill in the reimbursement form
Every reimbursement request start with the reimbursement form. This form can be found on http://intranet.myaegee.net/group_file/view/3/1613. You have to fill in this form completely, accept for those parts marked “filled in by FD”. You start by filling in you personal data on the first page. Afterwards you fill in detailed travel and other costs on page 2 and 3.
For travels, use 1 line per leg of your journey, per ticket. Put the amounts in the original currency as written on the bills. After filling in the tables on page 2 and 3, you go back to page 1, to fill in the totals. To convert the amounts in other currencies to euro, you should always use this website: http://ec.europa.eu/budget/inforeuro/index.cfm?Language=en. These are monthly rates published by the European Commission. The date that counts is the date of purchase, not the date of travel. Don’t forget to sign the form in the end!
Rule #2 – Attach all bills
After you filled in the form, you should attach the original travel tickets, receipts and invoices to your request. For travels this means the ticket that is valid for travel, and whenever the price is not mentioned on this tickets, a 2nd document to prove the price. For flight tickets this means I need all boarding passes and a printout of the booking confirmation. The bills should be ordered chronologically and numbered in correspondence with the numbers used on the form.
Rule #3 – Staple!
The previous part “attach bills”, does NOT mean you simply put all the tickets and boarding passes in an envelop together with the reimbursement form! If you do this, you will be cut 10% of your total reimbursement amount. The only way you can send your reimbursement is with all bills and receipts stapled to A4 paper, without overlapping. This is very important, as we have to scan all the bills later on when we send our financial report to the European Commission. Please carefully look at the following pictures, one good and one bad example. Good luck with filling in all your upcoming reimbursements!
Bad example: No reimbursement form, tickets not stapled to A4
Good example: Filled in reimbursement form, all tickets and boarding passes stapled to A4