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

DTS vouchers have eaten more of my time than I care to admit. As someone who spent years processing and fixing these things — first as a unit-level DTS clerk, then as a defense travel administrator supporting hundreds of service members across multiple commands — I learned everything there is to know about what breaks the system and why. 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 a wall of error messages, and Google something like “DTS voucher rejected what do I do.” This is the plain-language answer to that search.

I’m covering the ten errors I’ve personally fixed most often, roughly in the order they show up. Some will feel obvious in hindsight. That’s fine. The goal is getting your reimbursement approved and your money back — not feeling great about the paperwork.

Itinerary Dates Out of Order

This is the one I fix most often. Hands down. DTS wants your itinerary in strict chronological order, and it is not forgiving when something’s off.

Here’s where it gets people: you had a clean trip planned, then something changed. Maybe you flew into Atlanta a day early to catch a connection. Maybe the conference stretched an extra 24 hours. Maybe you swung through a second duty location on the way home. You updated the 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 reach the signature page.

The fix is manual. Rebuild the itinerary so every leg appears in correct date order. Departed the 10th, arrived the 11th, TDY ran through the 15th, returned the 16th — those 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, add it as a separate line and zero out lodging and meals for that leg.

Don’t make my mistake. My first year, I had a traveler who’d manually typed her return date a full week earlier than her actual travel. DTS accepted it, showed zero red flags during data entry, then rejected the voucher at routing. We spent two hours diagnosing what should have been a five-minute fix.

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

Missing Receipts for Expenses Over $75

But what is a hard stop in DTS? In essence, it’s the system refusing to route your voucher forward until something gets resolved. But it’s much more than that — it’s usually a sign that something foundational was missed during filing. Missing receipts are the fastest way to hit one.

DTS flags any expense above $75 without an attached receipt. Full stop. Doesn’t matter if it’s a government-contracted property. Doesn’t matter if you paid with a government travel card. No receipt means no reimbursement — or at minimum, a hard stop in approval routing.

The biggest offenders: hotel folios, rental car agreements, conference registration fees. Hotel folios especially. Someone checks out at 5 AM, grabs a paper receipt at the front desk, leaves it in the rental car, and has nothing to upload two weeks later when they finally sit down to file.

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

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 official letterhead confirming the registration fee amount. DTS accepted the letter as supporting documentation. Not the cleanest fix — but it works.

When you upload, make sure the receipt is actually legible. A blurry photo of a crumpled paper is going to 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 — usually fine for a standard hotel folio, but if you’re uploading a multi-page conference itinerary as supporting documentation, compress it first.

Per Diem Location Mismatch

Probably should have opened with this section, honestly. 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.

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 worked at a different installation part of the time, 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 entered in the itinerary. If that location doesn’t match what’s on your orders, your approving official kicks it back. If your trip covered multiple locations — two installations, a conference site, a home station stop in between — each leg needs its own itinerary entry with the correct city and dates.

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

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 doesn’t always auto-deduct provided meals — a lot of travelers don’t realize they’re required to mark them manually.

This comes up most often with conference travel. Three-day conference, registration covers a continental breakfast and catered lunch each day, traveler files at full per diem for all three days. Finance catches it. Now there’s an amendment, a recalculation, a delay. All of it could have taken thirty seconds 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. The system reduces your per diem automatically using the correct proportional deduction. A continental breakfast runs roughly $13 to $18 depending on location. Lunch runs higher. It adds up over a week-long conference.

DFAC meals count too. If you ate at a dining facility on a military installation and meals were available at no cost to you, those need to be deducted. I’ve seen vouchers come back from finance with retroactive deductions applied — the traveler got less than expected because nobody mentioned this during out-processing.

Signature Date Before Travel End Date

You cannot sign your voucher before your trip is over. DTS enforces this without exception. If your travel end date is October 18th and you try to sign on October 16th because you got home early and want to knock out the paperwork — the system will reject the signature.

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 — the voucher should reflect actual travel, not planned travel.

Second: you’re trying to file proactively while still on the road. Stop. Wait. File when travel is complete. No workaround exists for this one, and there shouldn’t be.

The 5-day rule matters here. DoD policy requires vouchers to be submitted within five business days of returning from TDY. I know that sounds aggressive when you’ve just dragged yourself home from three weeks on the road. File anyway. Late vouchers create budget headaches for your unit 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 a dollar — DTS flags the discrepancy and your voucher needs an exception to policy or a justification memo before it routes to approval.

Sometimes this is genuinely unavoidable. You’re in downtown Washington D.C., the government rate is $258 per night, the conference hotel room block is $289. That’s $31 per night overage — document it. DTS has a field to explain why lodging exceeded the authorized rate. Write something clear and factual: “Conference hotel room block was the only lodging within 0.5 miles of the event site; GSA-approved properties in the area were unavailable during event dates.” Save any emails showing the room block rate.

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

Rental Car Claimed Without Authorization

A rental car expense on a voucher without authorization on the orders is an immediate rejection. No gray area. If you rented because it was convenient and didn’t get it added to your authorization before departure — you’re either filing an amendment with justification, which may not get approved, or you’re paying for the car yourself.

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

That’s what makes the pre-travel checklist endearing to us seasoned travelers — it’s the kind of tedious thing that saves you real money. 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. 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 whether the POV use was determined “advantageous to the government” versus “at the convenience of the traveler” puts you in 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, claimed the full constructive cost of airfare as justification, but never got that comparison documented before travel. DTS requires a cost comparison in many cases — run it, attach it. If driving was cheaper or equivalent, you’re fine. If flying was significantly cheaper and you drove anyway, expect a reduced reimbursement.

While you won’t need an accounting degree to sort this out, you will need a clear paper trail showing the cost comparison was completed before departure. That is because the approval hinges on the documented comparison, not your memory of what flights cost that week.

Duplicate Expenses Between Authorization and Voucher

Sometimes a traveler pays for something out of pocket, claims it on the voucher, and the government travel card was also charged for the same item — the vendor ran it twice, or a booking got confused somewhere. 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. If the same hotel charge appears on both, you have a duplicate. Resolve it with the vendor before submitting. Finding this yourself is considerably less painful than finance calling you about it three weeks after submission.

Voucher Not Matching the Amended Authorization

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

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

The cleanest prevention — when an amendment gets approved, take five minutes right then to note what changed. Write it down on paper, in your phone, anywhere. Keep a simple running record: dates, locations, authorized expenses. That way when you sit down to file 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 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 that 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 beats three email chains every time. Fix the flagged items, resubmit, and follow up if you haven’t heard back within 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.