To support compliance with Northwestern’s expense reimbursement policies and improve the expense reimbursement experience, beginning November 1, 2025 the assignment of an Expenses Supervisor is mandatory when submitting expense reports in NUFinancials. This change applies to all employees and proxies. myHR has a field used to maintain the Expenses Supervisors.

What’s Changing

Currently, if no supervisor is set up in myHR, employees may attach a signed copy of the expense report. Starting November 1, this will no longer be accepted. Instead:

• An active Expenses Supervisor must be assigned via myHR before an expense report can be submitted (see: Expenses Supervisors).

• If the field is not populated, the expense report can be saved, but not submitted, until updated.

Missing Supervisor Error Message

If there is no primary or backup supervisor for an employee and either they or their proxy attempt to submit an expense report, they will receive the following error message:

Expenses Supervisor Required. Please save this expense report and contact your local Supervisor/Unit Administrator to have an expenses supervisor assigned. You will be able to submit this report once a primary or backup expenses supervisor has been assigned.

Maintaining the Expenses Supervisor in myHR

Though expense reports are submitted in NUFinancials, expense supervisors are maintained in myHR. For instructions to review and update this information, see Expenses Supervisors and Expenses Supervisor Backups.

Note that only authorized myHR administrators can update this information:

• To change expenses supervisors, you must have the myHR Basic Data Entry role.

• If you already have Data Lookup (Full or Limited) but not Basic Data Entry, please request the Basic Data Entry role via HR Systems Access Request Form or if access is needed immediately, via email from your supervisor requesting the role to myhr-security@northwestern.edu.