Travel Desk — Quick Start

1. Open any email in Outlook and click Travel Desk on the ribbon. The form opens in a panel on the right.

2. Has your coordinator added you? Click Find my setup in the blue box at the top. Travel Desk reads the invitation already sitting in your mailbox and configures itself — the planner, the right addresses, and your fiscal-year rules. Nothing to copy or paste. (Given a code by hand instead? Paste it in Setup. Nobody set you up yet? Ask your coordinator, or see the coordinator section below.)

3. Don't type what the confirmation already says. Open the registration or booking confirmation and click 📥 Fill from this email at the top of the form. Travel Desk reads the message and its attachments — the agenda, the invitation letter, a calendar invite, a cost worksheet — and fills in the event, the dates, the destination, your role, the registration fee and the room rate.

It also works out who else is paying. On invitational or sponsored travel the confirmation usually spells out what the host covers — lodging, airfare, meals, ground transport — and buries the billing contact several paragraphs below it. Travel Desk fills in Third-party reimbursement #1 from that: the payer, their contact address, and which categories they cover. Check it and add the cap in Max reimbursement if the email states one — that's what lets Travel Desk chase the money after the trip.

Links are unwrapped, too. Everything arriving at a state mailbox is rewritten by the mail filter into a 400-character urldefense.proofpoint.com address; the real event link is recovered from inside it so the authorization form carries something a human can read.

Under each filled field it shows where the value came from, down to the line it matched, so you can check it against the email in a glance instead of re-deriving it. It will not overwrite anything you have already typed unless you tick Replace what I've already typed — and what it left alone is listed too.

Where it isn't sure, it leaves the field blank and says why. An unlabelled dollar figure is ignored on purpose: in a confirmation, $1,240.00 might be the registration, the hotel total, or last year's price, and a wrong number on a travel authorization is worse than an empty box. Same for a scanned PDF with no readable text — it tells you it couldn't read it rather than quietly finding nothing.

Then read down the form and correct anything that looks off. Departure and Return are assumed to be the day either side of the event, which is a guess and is labelled as one.

4. Fill in the rest. Only three fields are truly required — they're marked required: your Name, the Conference / event name, and the Location. Everything else improves the paperwork but won't block you.

5. Stuck on Reason for travel? Tap one of the grey justification chips (Professional development, Committee member, Presenting…) — it drops a sentence into the box that you can edit.

6. Enter costs as you know them. The Estimated total updates as you type, and lodging is calculated for you (nights × rate).

6b. Travelling as a group? List the others in Other travelers on this trip, one per line — Jane Doe, MVD, Field Ops, speaker (only the name is required; blank parts inherit yours). Each person gets their own planner row, so division totals and any budget report count everybody. Use the Costs entered above are dropdown to say whether those costs are per person or for the whole group.

7. Being reimbursed by a conference, association, or grant? Open Third-party reimbursement #1 and fill in who's paying, how much, and their billing contact email. That last one matters — it's what lets Travel Desk chase the money later.

8. Click Create travel request at the bottom. Your email draft opens for you to review — read it, then press Send yourself. The planner row is added at the same time.

Open ✈️ My trips → Close out a trip, pick the trip, and put in roughly what it cost. A ballpark is fine. It updates the same planner row your request created — your estimate stays put, so the two sit side by side.

1. Open Setup (once) → Coordinator setup.

2. No planner yet? Type a name and click Create my planner — Travel Desk builds one in your OneDrive with the right columns, formats it as a table, and connects to it. Skip to step 4.
Already have a planner? Click Show my files and pick it (or paste its SharePoint/OneDrive "Copy link"), then Connect workbook.

3. Pick the Planner table. If the workbook has no table yet, Travel Desk says so and offers Make this sheet a table — choose the sheet your planner is on and click it. Your rows are untouched; a table just lets the add-in append safely, and it gives you filters and an auto-expanding range for free.

4. Set This planner covers fiscal year (e.g. SFY27) and click Save planner for this year. Next year, connect the new workbook and save it under the new year — trips route themselves to the right planner by date. Leave the year blank to use one workbook for everything.

5. Fill in Coordinator email (where authorization requests go), Finance / AR contact (where Workday receivable packets go — blank sends them to you), Organization name, the fiscal year rules, and your funding program label (TEWD, Grant, Program — or blank to hide the field).

6. Open Add your travelers, type or paste their email addresses (a pasted Outlook To: line works), and click Write the invitation. Review the draft and press Send. Each traveler opens Travel Desk, clicks Find my setup, and is configured identically to you — you never answer a setup question. If someone loses the invitation, send it again. For an external contractor who can't receive internal mail, Or share a setup code by hand still works.