Chrome River Expense

What is Chrome River Expense?

Expense is one of two Chrome River modules (along with Invoice) that the College is implementing. Expense is the College's new expense management system, designed to automate and streamline both the travel & expense reimbursement and Purchasing Card (PCard) monthly reconciliation processes. This cloud-based application replaces the former paper-based process for travel & expense reimbursement and the Bank of America Works application for PCard reconciliation. Additionally, Chrome River Expense uses dynamic approval workflows, which are not available in the Bank of America Works program, so the Financial Manager of a particular budget approves expenses instead of a dedicated approver for each PCard holder.

Key User Roles in Chrome River Expense

Expense Owner: The expense owner is the employee or student who is to be reimbursed for a particular expense or the PCard holder whose PCard was charged for a particular expense.

Financial Manager: The person ultimately responsible for a particular budget (FOAP). In Chrome River Expense, the financial manager is responsible for approvals of expenses charged to their budget except in cases where the financial manager is also the expense owner. NOTE: Each budget has a single financial manager.

Delegate: A delegate is someone who has access to an expense owner’s Chrome River Expense account and can create expense reports on behalf of the expense owner.

Student Reimbursements, Stipends, and Awards

All student reimbursements, stipends, and awards must be processed through Chrome River Expense by a College employee. Students do not have Chrome River accounts to submit their own expense reports. The procedure for student payments is similar to any other reimbursement request; however, you must follow a specific protocol in entering the report name. You will also need to select “Student Expenses” as the report type and choose the student’s name from the “Active Students” list. Please refer to the Student Reimbursements Guide for further information.

Purchasing Access

Purchasing access is a Banner Finance term for a level of access that allows an employee to purchase or expense an item to a particular budget (or FOAP, short for Fund-Organization-Account-Program string). This restriction, known as Fund/Org Security prevents individuals from purchasing items from a budget for which they do not have the approval to do so. However, with Chrome River Expense it also means that each employee at the College must be provided with purchasing access for a budget before they can charge an expense to that budget.

 If you find that you or a member of your team lack purchasing access for a particular budget, the member of the Finance Office who can grant this access in Banner is 1) Ernie Wright (ewright3@swarthmore.edu) for your department’s operating budget; 2) Denise Risoli (drisoli1@swarthmore.edu) for restricted funds (i,e., funds beginning 2XXXX), 3) Christy Brydges (cbrydge1@swarthmore.edu) for grants, and 4) Joe Cataldi (jcatald1@swarthmore.edu) for capital budgets (i.e., funds beginning 9XXXX). The process for requesting this access is to send an email to the Financial Manager of the budget in question copying the appropriate individual listed above requesting approval for Purchasing Authority to the particular budget. Once the Financial Manager provides approval, purchasing access will typically be granted within 24 hours; however, the feed from Banner to Chrome River occurs overnight, so updates in Chrome River do not happen in real time.

 NOTE: With purchasing access, the employee can charge items to the budget but does not have access too view the particular budget (please contact Ernie Wright in the Budget Office for further information on this topic).

 

Chrome River Expense User Guides

Creating an Expense Report

Student Reimbursements, Stipends, and Awards

Approving an Expense Report