Study Leave: Occasional Posts on Research, Writing and Other Academic Matters: admin day

Uzbekistan Airways Boarding Pass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I finally finished the paperwork for the conference participants who wanted travel reimbursements. If I can just offer some advice to anyone applying for a travel reimbursement:

If you are sending in several different kinds of receipt, a cover note with a list of the receipts, what they're for, and the amount, will make the bookkeeping much easier for whoever's doing the paperwork. I kept finding receipts I missed the first, second, and third times I went through the stacks of papers, and then I'd have to recalculate everything.
Thanks for the boarding passes, really. But I also need to know what the ticket COST. Send the invoice too.
if you're sending in scans of boarding passes or what have you by email, send everything in the same email. One email with a boarding pass, and then another one a few days later from a different account with an invoice, and then another one a week and a half after that saying that you forgot all about your hotel bill, also you had to take a cab to the airport, is understandable; who keeps all their receipts in one place? Naturally you keep finding things and better to send them late than not at all. But it does not make the paperwork any easier for the grant holder.
please: an address to which you would like your check to be sent. Please.

Emailing people and asking for information they had omitted to send me slowed the process down a good deal too. And this kind of work - collating many different bits of paper from many different sources and organizing them, and then having to re-organize them for the auditors - is very much not my favourite thing. And it took, even once I stopped dragging my feet, days and days to do. Everyone else I know who's had to do this says "Oh, I just got the secretary to do it." How do you get a secretary to do it?

Anyway. This is, really, and I mean it, the last time I'm organizing a conference. I've done it 3 times and I think that is sufficient. I've done my bit for the discipline. But if it weren't for all the bloody bookkeeping afterwards and grant-writing beforehand I wouldn't mind doing it again. That's the worst part of it, by far. If I were just setting up a venue and a schedule and organizing a lunch, I could do that over a weekend.

Leaving for Slayage tomorrow, and then for Europe, and Toronto, with the family. I have not begun to pack, or think about packing, even.