Our current template and routine for travel reporting has remained largely unchecked since 2018.

The template does a lot of heavy lifting serving as:

1. The place where travel is proposed for the ED to approve. Info incl. an estimate of travel costs, if combined with any personal visit, modes of transport.
2. The place where ED approval is recorded.
3. The place where a post-travel report is added, incl. details of the visit/event and how things went.
4. The place where the traveller certifies that the Travel and Environmental Policy were observed.
5. (When applicable) The place where the traveller makes a compensation claim for daily allowances (with deductions for meal costs) and compensation for travel time. The later may include details of the time when the traveller left/returned to their home, if they stayed at private accommodation while travelling etc.

The current solutions has some pros and cons:

Pros:

• everything is in one place (convenient for a reader, the traveller and the ED)
• easy to find all travel by a person/to a certain event.
• transparent (see comment below)
• easily turned to a pdf and digitally signed to serve as a basis for travel compensation.

Cons:

• the level of details provided might make it harder to parse for the casual reader (obscured transparency)
• the final cost for the travel is not stated (nor the costs of any compensation)
• potentially sensitive/personal information is revealed (patterns of when someone leaves their home, where they have acquaintances they stay with etc. )
• the heavy lifting makes the template needfully complex
• the report still needs to be printed out and signed (albeit digitally) for compensation claims.

Especially the issue around sensitive personal information makes the case for reviewing this template/routine.

Ideas around potential changes:

• The compensation section be moved off the template, instead the total compensation amount can be added afterwards.
  • this section contains most of the private data
  • this section is the one in most need of digital signing, and so could be moved to a platform supporting this natively.
• The pre-travel approval process be looked over
  • This sometimes introduces needless delays to an otherwise straightforward booking process. ED approval could possibly instead be triggered by one or more of 1) estimated cost over some threshold, 2) overnight stay, 3) International travel; and otherwise be up to the discretion of the project manager
  • Travel cost estimates are often off or become so once delays are introduced
  • Details of exact times travel will start etc. are likely unnecessary. Start/end day should be enough and would also indirectly indicate if an overnight stay is included. This has been changed
  • "combined with personal visit" risks revealing personal information. That it will occur might be relevant for transparency and as an approval trigger, but the details need not be public.
• We should take a closer look at what information is most likely to be sought from someone viewing the reports for transparency reasons and ensure these facts are presented in a clear way and with an appropriate level of details.

To take into consideration:

• The template is used by staff AND board (and may in certain cases also apply to volunteers) any changes must either work for all of these or leave a fall-back option for the more infrequent cases).
• The templates are used for the internal audit (ensuring policies are followed i.e. travel is always pre-approved and the environmental aspects have been considered).
• Our environmental impact report has some additional new requirements on the template.