Travel Desk — Quick Start
Travel Desk turns one form into the two things every out-of-state
trip needs: the Travel Authorization email to your coordinator, and the
row in the shared travel planner. Then it keeps track of what happens next —
bookings, and money a third party owes you back.
Travelers: your first trip (5 minutes)
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. Fill in the form. 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.
4. 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.
5. Enter costs as you know them. The Estimated total updates
as you type, and lodging is calculated for you (nights × rate).
5b. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
Nothing is submitted automatically. Travel Desk writes the draft
and the planner row; you always press Send. If the draft doesn't pop up, it's waiting in
your Drafts folder.
After you travel: close out the trip
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.
This is a gauge, not an expense claim. The question it answers is
"is travel costing about what we planned?" — and a round number answers that just as well as
an exact one. Don't wait until you have every receipt. Your expenses are still claimed through
Workday exactly as before; nothing here replaces that.
After the trip is filed
| Section | What it does |
|---|
| ✈️ My trips |
Lists what you've filed. Check for booking emails scans your inbox for
confirmations (Concur or whoever your org books through) and links them to the
right trip, so you can see at a glance what's still unbooked. |
| 💵 Third-party reimbursements owed |
After a trip ends, anything a third party agreed to cover shows up here, aged
in days. Workday packet drafts the email finance needs to set up the
receivable in Workday. Remind drafts a polite nudge to the third party.
Record the Workday number, and mark Received ✓ when the money lands. |
Travel Desk never touches Workday itself. It prepares the request and
tracks the follow-up; a human in finance keys the entry.
These write back to the shared planner. Marking a trip booked —
or Travel Desk spotting the booking confirmation in your inbox — updates the Status on
your row in the planner, and marking a reimbursement received notes it there too. That's
what keeps the coordinator's list honest, so nobody chases you for a trip you already
booked or money that already arrived.
Coordinators: one-time setup (15 minutes)
Do this once, then hand every traveler a setup code and you're finished.
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.
Template drift is handled. Travel Desk matches your planner's
columns by header name, not position — so when next year's template moves or
renames columns, it keeps working.
Coordinators: the gauge, then one short queue
The coordinator view opens with the reading, not with work:
| Section | What it is |
|---|
| Gauge |
Planned versus actual across trips that have been closed out — compared like for like.
Money committed on trips still to come is reported separately, so the number
isn't flattered by counting estimates against actuals that don't exist yet. |
| Approve travel |
The one real queue: requests nobody has authorised yet, soonest departure first. One
click records your approval, your name and the date on the planner row. |
| Closed out recently |
Trips with costs in, worst overrun first, anything past 20% flagged. Nothing here needs
doing unless a number looks wrong — Mark seen just tidies the list. |
Travel Desk records approvals; it does not enforce them. There is no
server here to gate anything, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The value is that
the planner shows who approved what and when, without anyone re-keying it.
Coordinators: the daily view
Once your planner is connected, a 🗂 Coordinator view section appears (travelers
who set up with a profile code never see it). Click Load everyone's travel and you get,
from the shared planner rather than your own trips:
| Panel | What it answers |
|---|
| Still to book | Upcoming trips whose status isn't booked or approved — your follow-up list. |
| Coming up | Everyone's upcoming travel, soonest first. |
| Spend by division | Trips and dollars per division, and per fiscal year — the numbers behind next year's request. |
| Third party owing | Finished trips where somebody agreed to reimburse, so nothing quietly goes uncollected. |
| Authorizations vs planner | Cross-checks the Travel Authorization emails in your inbox against planner rows, and flags both directions: a request you approved that never reached the planner, and a planner row with no authorization behind it. |
Type a fiscal year (like SFY27) to scope every panel to one year, or
leave it blank for everything. For charts and trends, use the Power BI recipe below — the
coordinator view is deliberately about what needs doing today.
Analytics (optional)
Because the planner is an Excel table on SharePoint, Power BI reads it natively —
budget burn per division, a follow-up queue, a destination map. The build recipe is in
POWERBI.md in the project repository; hand it to whoever runs Power BI at your
agency.
Trouble
| What you see | What to do |
|---|
| The Planner table dropdown is empty |
The sheet isn't an Excel Table yet — use Make this sheet a table in the
yellow box that appears. (Doing it manually in Excel works too:
select the data → Insert > Table → save → Connect workbook again.) |
| Only one row appeared for a group trip |
Additional travellers go in Other travelers on this trip, one per line.
Names listed in prose elsewhere don't generate rows. |
| "Name, event, and location are required" |
Those three fields are blank — they're the ones marked required. |
| The draft didn't open |
Some Outlook versions block pop-ups. The draft was still created — check your
Drafts folder. |
| Nothing in reimbursements owed |
Only trips that have already ended and had a third party entered appear
there. Trips filed before this feature existed won't show. |
| A sign-in popup appears |
Normal — Travel Desk acts as you, using your own Microsoft 365 permissions. It
never sees anything you couldn't already open. |