DTS Voucher Errors — The 10 Most Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them

DTS voucher errors have eaten more of my time than I care to admit. After processing and fixing vouchers for years — first as a unit-level DTS clerk, then as a defense travel administrator supporting hundreds of service members across multiple commands — I’ve seen the same mistakes repeat themselves with almost poetic consistency. The DoD has a 50-page PDF guide for this. Nobody reads it. What people actually do is finish their TDY, sit down to file their voucher, hit an error message, and then Google something like “DTS voucher rejected what do I do.” This article is the plain-language answer to that search.

I’m covering the ten most common errors I’ve personally fixed, in the order I see them most often. Some of these will feel obvious in hindsight. That’s fine. The point is to get your reimbursement approved and your money back in your account — not to feel good about the process.

Itinerary Dates Out of Order

This is the one I fix most often. Hands down. DTS requires your itinerary to flow in strict chronological order, and the system is not forgiving when it doesn’t.

Here’s where it gets people: you had a smooth trip planned, then something changed. Maybe you flew into Atlanta a day early to catch a connection. Maybe your conference got extended by 24 hours. Maybe you took a side trip to visit a second duty location on the way back. You updated your authorization, sort of, but when you go to build the voucher, the dates are fighting each other and DTS throws an error before you can even get to the signature page.

The fix is manual. Go into your itinerary and rebuild it so every single leg of travel appears in the correct date order. If you departed on the 10th, arrived on the 11th, had the TDY from the 11th through the 15th, and returned on the 16th — those dates need to appear exactly in that sequence. No gaps. No overlaps. If you had a layover city that doesn’t match your per diem location, you may need to add it as a separate line and just zero out the lodging and meals for that leg.

I learned this the hard way during my first year. I had a traveler with a modified itinerary who had manually typed in her return date a week earlier than actual travel. DTS accepted it, showed no red flags during data entry, then rejected the voucher at the routing stage. We spent two hours diagnosing what should have been a five-minute fix.

If your dates are out of order and you can’t figure out which entry is wrong — print the itinerary to PDF, go line by line, and look for any date that appears before the one above it. That’s your problem.

Missing Receipts for Expenses Over $75

DTS will flag any expense above $75 that does not have a receipt attached. Full stop. It doesn’t matter if the hotel is a government-contracted property. It doesn’t matter if you paid with a government travel card. No receipt, no reimbursement — or at minimum, a hard stop in the approval routing.

The most common offenders I see are hotel folios, rental car agreements, and conference registration fees. Hotel folios are the biggest one. Someone checks out at 5 AM, gets a paper receipt at the front desk, loses it in the rental car, and then has nothing to upload two weeks later when they sit down to file.

Here’s what to do when the receipt is gone: call the hotel directly. Most major chains — Marriott, Hilton, IHG properties — can email you a duplicate folio within 24 hours if you give them your name, arrival date, and the last four of your card. I’ve done this dozens of times. It works. For rental cars, Enterprise and Hertz both have online account portals where you can download a full receipt PDF for any completed rental. Go there first.

Frustrated by a missing conference receipt that a government contractor had “no record of,” I eventually tracked down the finance officer for the event and got a signed letter on letterhead confirming the registration fee amount. DTS accepted the letter as supporting documentation. It’s not the clean solution, but it works.

When you upload, make sure the receipt is legible. A blurry photo of a crumpled paper receipt will get kicked back just as fast as no receipt at all. Scan to PDF when you can. The file size limit in DTS is 2MB per attachment, which is usually fine for a standard hotel folio but can be a problem if you’re uploading a multi-page conference itinerary as supporting documentation — compress it first.

Per Diem Location Mismatch

Your TDY orders say Fort Cavazos, Texas. Your voucher per diem rates are pulling for Killeen, Texas — which technically serves the same area but doesn’t match the location name on your orders. Or worse: your orders say one city, you actually did part of the work at a different installation, and now the whole per diem section looks like it was filed by someone who wasn’t paying attention. Which, to be fair, describes most of us at 10 PM after a three-week TDY.

DTS calculates per diem based on the location you enter in the itinerary. If that location doesn’t match what’s on your orders, your approving official will kick it back. If your trip involved multiple locations — two different installations, a conference site, and a home station stop in between — each of those legs needs its own entry in the itinerary with the correct city and dates.

The fix is to add each location as a separate leg. Don’t try to average it out or put a note in the comments field. DTS doesn’t read comments. Add the leg, set the correct location, and let the system pull the right per diem rate for each city. The rates vary more than you’d think — San Diego and rural Texas are not the same number.

Probably should have opened with this section, honestly, because this error causes more downstream problems than almost any other. Get the locations right first and half the other per diem issues sort themselves out.

Government Meal Deduction Errors

If someone fed you on the government’s dime, you don’t get to claim that meal in your per diem. That’s the rule. The problem is that DTS does not always auto-deduct provided meals, and a lot of travelers don’t realize they’re required to manually mark them.

This comes up most often with conference travel. You attend a three-day conference, the registration fee covers a continental breakfast and a catered lunch each day, and you file your voucher at full per diem for all three days. Your AOPC or finance office catches it. Now you have to go back, recalculate, and amend. It’s a mess that could have taken thirty seconds to fix during initial filing.

In DTS, navigate to the per diem section for the relevant day. There’s a meals tab. Each meal — breakfast, lunch, dinner — can be marked as “provided.” Check the boxes that apply. The system will automatically reduce your per diem for those meals using the correct proportional deduction. For the continental breakfast at most government per diem rates, that’s around $13 to $18 depending on location. Lunch runs higher. It adds up over a week-long conference.

Government dining facilities count too. If you ate at a DFAC on a military installation during your TDY and meals were available at no cost to you, those need to be deducted. I’ve seen vouchers come back from finance with deductions applied retroactively and the traveler getting less than expected because nobody told them this during out-processing.

Signature Date Before Travel End Date

You cannot sign your voucher before your trip is over. DTS enforces this. If your travel end date is October 18th and you try to sign on October 16th because you got home early and want to get the paperwork done, the system will reject the signature.

There are two scenarios here. First: your trip actually ended early. You flew back two days ahead of schedule. In that case, go back into the voucher and adjust the travel end date to reflect when you actually returned. Use the real date. Don’t leave the original date just because that’s what the orders say — the voucher should reflect actual travel, not planned travel.

Second: you’re trying to file proactively and your trip isn’t done yet. Stop. Wait. File when travel is complete. There’s no workaround for this one and there shouldn’t be.

The 5-day rule matters here too. DoD policy requires vouchers to be submitted within five business days of returning from TDY. I know that sounds aggressive when you’ve just gotten home from three weeks on the road. File anyway. Late vouchers create headaches for your unit’s DTS budget and can cause your government travel card balance to accrue interest, which is its own separate problem you don’t want.

Lodging Claimed Above the Authorized Rate

Every TDY location has a maximum lodging rate set by the GSA. If your hotel cost more than that rate — even by $1 — DTS will flag the discrepancy and your voucher will require an exception to policy or a justification memo before it routes to approval.

Sometimes this is unavoidable. You’re traveling to a conference in downtown Washington D.C., the government rate is $258/night, and the only available rooms at the conference hotel were $289. That’s a $31 overage per night. Document it. In DTS, there’s a field to explain why the lodging exceeded the authorized rate. Write a clear, factual explanation: “Conference hotel room block was the only lodging within 0.5 miles of the event site; rates at GSA-approved properties within the area were unavailable during the event dates.” Save emails showing the conference room block rate if you have them.

On the other hand — if you upgraded yourself, chose a nicer hotel than necessary, or just didn’t check the GSA rate before booking, that’s on you. DTS will reimburse up to the authorized rate only, and you’ll eat the difference. Check GSA.gov before you book. Every time.

Rental Car Claimed Without Authorization

A rental car expense submitted on a voucher when no rental car was authorized on the orders is an immediate rejection. No gray area. If you rented a car because it was convenient and didn’t get it added to your authorization before departure, you’re either filing an amendment to the authorization — which requires justification and may not be approved — or you’re paying for the car yourself.

The most common version of this I see: a service member flies into an airport, rents a car to get to the installation, doesn’t think to check whether the rental was authorized, and then tries to claim $247 from Enterprise on the voucher. The installation has a shuttle. It’s in the orders remarks. The rental wasn’t authorized.

If you genuinely needed a rental car and it wasn’t on your authorization, amend the authorization first, get it approved, then file the voucher. Doing it in the right order matters.

POV Mileage Claimed on the Wrong Rate

Privately owned vehicle mileage reimbursement in DTS can be claimed at different rates depending on circumstances, and the rate you claim needs to match what was authorized. The standard IRS-based mileage rate for 2024 is 67 cents per mile. But if use of a POV was determined to be “advantageous to the government” versus “at the convenience of the traveler,” those are different categories with different approval requirements.

Where people go wrong: they drove their personal vehicle instead of flying because it was easier for them personally, they claim the full constructive cost of airfare as justification, but they didn’t get that comparison documented before travel. DTS will require a cost comparison in many cases. Run the comparison. Attach it. If driving was cheaper or equivalent, you’re fine. If flying was significantly cheaper and you drove anyway, expect a reduced reimbursement.

Duplicate Expenses Between Authorization and Voucher

Sometimes a traveler pays for something out of pocket, claims it on the voucher, but the government travel card was also charged for the same item because the vendor ran it twice or there was a booking confusion. DTS may not catch this automatically. Your finance office will.

Before submitting, pull your government travel card statement and compare it line by line against what you’re claiming in the voucher. If the same hotel charge appears on both, you have a duplicate. Resolve it with the vendor before submitting. Catching this yourself is much less painful than having finance contact you about it three weeks after submission.

Voucher Not Matching the Amended Authorization

If your authorization was amended during travel — dates changed, a location was added, a rental car was added or removed — your voucher needs to reflect the final amended version of that authorization. Not the original. Not a middle version. The final approved amendment.

This is the error that takes longest to fix because it often requires going back through the amendment history in DTS, identifying which version was the last approved one, and then reconciling the voucher against it line by line. I’ve spent an hour and a half on a single voucher just doing this reconciliation for a traveler who had three amendments to their authorization over a two-week trip.

The cleanest prevention: when an amendment is approved, take five minutes right then to note what changed. Write it down. Keep a simple running record — dates of travel, locations, authorized expenses — so that when you sit down to file the voucher two weeks later, you’re not guessing which version of the trip DTS thinks you went on.

One More Thing Worth Saying

DTS is not intuitive. It was not designed with the end user in mind. The error messages it produces are frequently cryptic, the help documentation inside the system is outdated, and the training most service members receive amounts to a one-hour PowerPoint and a prayer. None of this is your fault. But the reimbursement is your money, and nobody is going to chase it for you.

When a voucher gets rejected, read the rejection comments carefully — your AOPC or approving official should leave specific notes about what needs to change. If the comments are vague, call them directly. Five minutes on the phone is worth more than three email chains. Fix the specific flagged items, resubmit, and follow up if you haven’t heard back in 48 hours.

The ten errors above cover probably 85% of what I’ve seen come across my desk over the years. Get these right and your vouchers will route clean.