conference travel

I'm getting ready to go to 4Cs next week, the first conference I'll attend as a representative of U of M Dearborn, and I'm thinking of the ways that academics must document their attendance at conferences for their home institutions.

At my former school, I got a per diem reimbursement for food, so no need for meal receipts, but I had to present receipts for conference registration, airline tickets, and the hotel. Okay, easy enough. But if you paid by credit card--and who doesn't use plastic when paying for such expenses?--you had to have a receipt AND the credit card statement with charges corresponding to the receipts. That meant 1) waiting to turn in paperwork until you received the statement the next month, 2) gathering multiple statements (the pre-paid conference registration charge from back in October, the "live" charges made at the conference during March, etc.), and 3) feedling your whole credit card statement into the University's bureacratic works (I blacked out the number with a marker, but there were always a weird array of charges listed on the statement that had nothing to do with the conference--yeah, yeah, I know, I could have gotten a credit card just for conferences, but I didn't, ok?). I always kiddingly gave the office manager a hard time, asking her if she thought I had worked out an elaborate plot to cheat Miami out of $400.

UMD doesn't have such a requirement, happily, but they *do* require that I save the conference badge, in order to prove there really was a conference. Yes, Margaret, there really is a 4Cs conference. And, really, how could anyone possibly fake a self-adhesive white sticker with his/her name typed on it? Not that I'm mad about it. It's a benign, albeit strange, request with which I'm happy to comply.