In sections 4a and 4b of the Certified Government Travel Professional Training Course, the areas of Payment Methods and Business Intelligence, Data Mining, and Data Warehouse are explained. These are relatively short sections but included a lot of great information. The electronic payment and reimbursement procedures used by the U.S. Postal Service are very easy and efficient. All authorized personnel who travel on a regular basis are issued VISA GSA SmartPay 2 cards. When we make our reservations thru our online Omega procedures, our credit card information is already in the system and our airline charges are automatically billed. Upon return from travel, we have a system called “E-Travel” and we enter all of our authorized travel expenses in the program. It is then forwarded to our manager for approval and sent to our Postal Data Center for processing. Unless required receipts need to be mailed, payment sometimes is made within a week. It is remarkably fast. EFT Payments are made to the credit card company and out of pocket payments made directly to our checking accounts. When I read the “GTR Phase Out” section, it brought back so many memories of using that document. In one of my early positions with the Postal Service, I worked with GTRs and it seems like so long ago. The Travel Data information in Section 4b was of interest since the number of government travel employees and their reason for travel are so diverse. The historical data provided in these cases can be used to project so much, including duplicating of efforts by many government agencies.
Joyce Wahoski, USPS Stamp Development