>Dear Network,
One of my tasks as the Financial Director is processing of all your reimbursement requests. According to CORPUS IURIDICUM AEGEENSE (CIA) some of costs you make as an active member of AEGEE are reimbursed to you. This mostly applies to travel costs to statutory events for people elected in various commissions, trips made by the Network Commissioners to visit locals they’re responsible for, trips to different project meetings and events supported by Youth in Action program. Detailed procedural rules and reimbursement criteria can be found at page 49-52 of the CORPUS IURIDICUM AEGEENSE (CIA).
Although I don’t have anything against costs made for good purposes of our association and I always try to transfer reimbursement money as soon as possible, there’s the part which highly increases amount of time I need to evaluate and approve your reimbursement request, and also highly decreases my mood. It is the form in which some of these requests arrive to my desk (usually sent by post, and then brought from the post box to my desk by Alla, the Secretary General). To improve the situation I will now present you a short course on how to make a reimbursement request to AEGEE-Europe properly. I hope this will result in a better work atmosphere for me, and eventually will mean that you will get your money faster!
Step #1 – Filling a reimbursement form out.
Any request should start from filling a reimbursement form out. This form can be found here. You start by filling your personal data out on the first page. Afterwards you write down detailed travel and other costs on page 2 and 3. You have to fill out this form completely, except the parts marked “filled in by Financial Director”.
For travels, use one line per a leg of your journey, per ticket. Put the amounts in the original currency as written on bills. After filling out the tables on page 2 and 3, you go back to page 1, to fill total amounts out. To convert amounts in other currencies to Euro, you should always use the following website: http://ec.europa.eu/budget/inforeuro/index.cfm?Language=en.
These are monthly rates published by the European Commission. The date that you take into account is the date of purchase, not the date of travel.
Don’t forget to fill “Date & Signature” part out!
Step #2 – Don’t forget to attach all bills
After you filled the form out, you should attach the original travel tickets, boarding passes, receipts and invoices to your request. For travels this means a ticket that is valid for travel, and if a price is not mentioned on this ticket, you have to attach a document which proves a 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.
Step #3 – Staple all bills!
The step #2, does NOT mean you simply put all the tickets and boarding passes in an envelope together with a reimbursement form! If you do this, following a decision made by previous CD, you will be cut by 10% of your total reimbursement amount with a maximum reduction of 10 Euro. 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 a Financial Report of AEGEE-Europe to the European Commission. Please look carefully at the following picture a good example of reimbursement request. Good luck with filling out all your upcoming reimbursements!
Good example: Filled in reimbursement form, all tickets are stapled to A4