Name: Financial Efficiency 101: Proven Tactics for Better Expense Control in Higher Ed Institutions
Uploaded: 2025-05-15T17:00:05.686Z
Duration: 1 h 29 min 56 s
Description: Financial Efficiency 101: Proven Tactics for Better Expense Control in Higher Ed Institutions

Transcript for "Financial Efficiency 101: Proven Tactics for Better Expense Control in Higher Ed Institutions": Hello, everyone. We'll give everybody just a couple more seconds here before we get started. Hope everybody is having a good Thursday. I wanna take you all I wanna thank you all for joining us today for our webinar, Financial Efficiency one zero one, proven tactics for better expense control in higher ed institutions. My name is Taylor Decorte. I am on the North American events team here at in person and your host for today's event. We're excited to bring you valuable insights from leaders in higher education who are rethinking the way institutions manage spend, improve compliance, and drive operational efficiency. Just a few housekeeping items for before we get started. Today's webinar is being recorded. A copy will be provided to everyone who registered twenty four hours after the conclusion of today's event. If you have any questions at any point in the webinar, please feel free to ask them in the q and a tab under the engagement area to your right. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. We also included some additional resources for you in the documents tab, so be sure to check those out as well. Alright. And with that, we always like to kick off our webinars with a couple of poll questions. So I'll go ahead and open up the first one here for us. And our first poll question for today is, what is your biggest challenge in managing institutional spend? Is it lack of visibility across departments and funding sources, slow manual processes that delay approvals and reimbursements, enforcing compliance with travel grant procurement and procurement policies, or poor alignment between finance procurement and campus stakeholders. Share those results as they come in. Looks like couple of, responses around enforcing compliance with travel. That is definitely something that we hear about, so you are in the right place. And I'll give everybody here a couple more seconds to get their answers in. Looks like we're also seeing slow manual processes. Definitely have heard those pain points before too. Perfect. Well, we're gonna close this one and move on to the next poll. And we'll open that one up for you as well. So this poll is really just to gauge, how your institution is approaching spend management. Would you grade yourself in a, b, c, or d? A is strategic, proactive, and well aligned across departments, which we hope for. B is most effective, but room across t or for cross team improvement. Sorry. Reactive with some visibility and compliance gaps. And then d is disconnected systems, little oversight or strategy. Definitely some room for improvement there. Shared those results as they're coming in too. Looks like, quite a few of you are rating yourselves in a b stage. So, definitely effective, but a little room for improvement. So good scenario to be in there. Got quite a few also kinda around the c, with reactive, but some visibility and compliance gaps. So, we're definitely gonna try and talk through how you can close some of those gaps today and where we can make those improvements. Hopefully, the goal is to get everybody to that a plus level. Right? We'll give you just another minute here before we close this one out as well. Alright. And I will be closing that poll here. And I really appreciate everybody responding here. We thank you for your engagement. It's always great to see what those responses to those poll questions are. For today's webinar, I'm very excited to, present our speakers, Lorrie Black, senior business analyst at University of New Mexico and a wonderful customer of Emburse. Lorrie has deep experience in system design, strategic project management, and end user training. She plays a key role in modernizing and streamlining financial operations across the university. And joining us from Emburse today is Mike Hoefler. Mike is a solutions consultant here at Emburse and works primarily with higher ed institutions to identify and solve their TME needs. So with that, I'll hand it over to Mike. Alright. Thank you, Taylor. And can you hear me okay? We can. Yep. Perfect. So hey. I'm Mike Hoefler, and I'm a solutions consultant here at Emburse. I've been here a little bit over eight years at this point focusing specifically on high helping higher ed institutions improve their travel and expense management processes. So while I don't work at a university myself, I spent the last really several years focusing on helping finance teams at colleges and across the country. It's gonna be a front row seat to the unique challenges and priorities higher ed faces. You know, things like getting better control over expenses, enforcing policy, closing the books faster. So one thing I've learned is in dozens of higher end institutions is that managing expenses isn't just about tracking receipts. It's navigating really intricate web policies, systems, and approvals. Let's start with approvals. At most universities, getting an expense approved isn't as simple as a manager clicking approve. You might route to the faculty travel reimbursement through department head, a grant administrator, and sometimes a central finance office each with their own review criteria and timing. It's a lot of steps and even if one approver is out of office, the whole process will stall. The complexity leads to delays, frustrated staff, and in some cases, missed deadlines for reimbursements through grant reporting. Then there's manual reconciliation, which I hear about constantly. Many institutions are still relying on spreadsheets or disconnected systems to match up card transactions, receipts, DL codes. That means some, often finance stretched in already, are spending hours every week to chase down documentation, validate entries, and fix errors. And the more manual process, the greater the chance that something gets missed essentially during fiscal close when volume spikes. And finally, the real time visibility is often the big gap. Without essentially digitalized system, just really difficult to for finance leaders to know what's been spent, what's been pending approval, or what's sitting in someone's inbox. Dialog of insight can create serious challenges, especially at year end when leadership is trying to understand the full financial picture, make decisions about budgets, or ensure that compliance is, you know, in line with grant terms. You can't manage what you can't see and the blind spot often leads to reactive decisions instead of proactive, planning. So when we look at these three challenges, complex approvals, manual reconciliation, and limited visibility, they're all interconnected and they add up at a process that's slow, fragmented, and difficult to scale. Alright. So in the past, year or so, we've done some studies on this. Right? And in talking to higher ed finance professionals, sixty two percent said they struggle with tracking expenses across systems. That's a big deal when you're managing tight budgets and complex funding sources. And 30% told us that reducing reimbursement processing times is a top priority this year. That tells us the strong momentum in the industry to modernize these workflows and get better spend control before it becomes a problem at the end of the core fiscal year. So we talked to a lot of schools out there. A lot of them are still doing things very manually and we're definitely seeing an uptick in the focus of, you know, allocating resources towards fixing this and of course diverting the people that are working on it currently towards pulling things that are more value added. So how do we solve for this? Long slide here. As I mentioned, right, higher ed can be a multi step process for an approvals, right? The approval workflows for expenses, whether it's for back to reimbursements, travel or grants, They're often complicated, time consuming, but automated routing can really help simplify this. So with an automated routing process, you can define clear rules for each expense type, who needs to approve it, in what order, and under what conditions. Oftentimes, it's based on cost thresholds or maybe a combination of a certain type of expense with a given, you know, with the given account that is coded to that can all be different combinations of routing. So trying to get the right level of approval on those things is oftentimes rather, you know, doing it manually, you're having to task a user in the approval workflow to decide who it goes to next. Having automation built into that can really help streamline that process, reduce the lag at each step, and also make sure that you're getting things to the right, places. So this really ensures that approvals can happen faster with fewer delays also more accurately and reliably. You'll minimize the risk of human error, such as forgetting an approver or missing an approval deadline. Plus, this will notify approvers when action is needed, reducing the chance of misapprovals due to oversight or absence. We also have a function where delegation approvals can be used. So if someone is out of office, they or allotment can assign someone to approve on their behalf as well. Again, trying to reduce that bottleneck, element that happens when when people are, you know, out of the office or potentially not disposable to approve expenses. So the end result is that your approval cycle times shrink, your employees spend less time chasing these signatures, and again, more time focusing on your role. Second, the manual reconciliation with AI and automation. Right? Manual reconciliation is really one of the biggest time sinks for finance teams, multiple systems, and paper trails to track. It's a painstaking process to ensure that all expenses are practically matched and coded. So this often leads to delays in the fiscal close and requires heavy oversight by the finance department that may be kind of the downloading of a spreadsheet and comparing line items on that against the receipts, confirming that they're all pointed in the right direction. And there's a lot of manual work that can be done with it. And it's also often what is happening in a download that's maybe once a month where you're kind of dealing with the bulk and, you know, downloading a card statement, making sure that the users have the right receipts and they're reaching out to people. Right? So the solution for this that that we propose and we see a lot of success with across our customer base is using AI and automation to help, kind of account for this. Right? Or help, you know, streamline this, I should say. So by integrating a system like Converse into the ERP, into your expense process, you can automate that reconciliation process. AI can automatically match receipts against transactions, flag discrepancies out of policy expenses for review. They can take a repeat of the user uploads, find that card transaction, live with it, so they're not confused as to whether does this belong to a card or does it not? It finds that automatically and goes to the right place. You're also reducing the onus on them to key in that data. Right? It's being done systematically, reliably, and automatically. They can do it or they can see the results and kinda make corrections as needed. Typically, they won't need to, but they're not starting from scratch and doing a lot of manual keying, which of course is the biggest area. It's prone for errors and all ultimately leads to a lot of really back and forth that that is almost unnecessary. So this saves time, reduce the chance of errors, misclassifications, and finance teams can rely on system to do the heavy lifting, bring up time to focus more on strategic tasks and forecasting. And really, it's a UI component that really does help downstream a lot. Right? A lot of times we do these demos and, you know, there's there's always nice to have UI components, but you're not talking to people that are actually the heaviest users of the system. But making their lives easier is is really something that makes everyone's lives easier because when they're making mistakes, you're dealing with downstream, sending it back and just adding a lot of steps that really don't need to be there. So in short, if you eliminate the repetitive error prone task and create a more efficient accurate installation process, policies get easier and faster especially during year end, where again that that volume is always really spiking. And we're asking a lot of, you know, everyone, not just users who haven't submitted things yet, but anyone who's dealing with the the downstream management of that process. Now third, the real time visibility and how that all kind of clogs in. Right? Many finance teams today you can talk to across the board. They're still working with outdated methods to track expenses. So spreadsheets or fragmented systems that don't talk to each other means your team can't really get a holistic view of your spending in real time, which can be a huge problem when you need to Mike decisions quickly. So for anything like audit or fiscal close. This is prevailing even with people who often have more automated system. Right? Sometimes the data is not accessible or it's not timely, Mike might be a day or two old or even more than that. And it really comes down to the democratization of data. It's something that we've really focused on and Emburse to try to Mike sure that the information that we have in the system is available to those who need it when they need it to to, you know, Mike the the decisions based on data as opposed to, you know, guesswork. Right? So the solution that we're proposing is real time dashboards and analytics to get finance leaders and department heads up to the minute information on where the money is going, what's been approved, what's still in pipeline. With centralized digital system, you can see the spending across all categories whether it's travel, grants, day to day operational expenses without having to sit through multiple spreadsheets or pull from different systems. This gets even stronger when you start expanding the scope. Right? We talk about things like a preapproval process, pre authorization for travel. Doesn't even need to be just for travel. We see that used for key card and procurement use cases as well. That only adds that visibility. You can do analytics on things like, you know, what preapprovals do you have in terms of open commitments rather than being reactive with your spend. You're actually able to forecast which spend is coming through the pipeline before those expenses have been incurred. And of course, I mentioned procurement. This doesn't even have to focus just on that travel related expense. We can bring in the p cards, get a holistic view of where all those expenses are being spent. And then when you have the analytics picture on that, you can look at, well, what's being spent potentially on a out of pocket situation that could be on a p card or vice versa. Kind of channel to spend. Are we reimbursing a bunch of people for, for things that maybe we have a central contract with say, Adobe that they could jump on licenses there, and we're paying them individually. So that visibility really the more information that you put through the system can give you stronger insight on to how how to move forward. So real time data means that for the first time you're able to take a proactive approach to spending rate and spot trends early, manage cash flow more effectively, and ensure compliance with brand and travel policies before it's too late. The best part is the dashboards can be customized and show the metrics that matter most of your team ensuring that they have insights on that they need to make the interim decisions. So this is really kind of one of the strongest components of it. Right? There's the end user component that makes it easier for them. It helps also, downstream any corrections and adjustments that need to be made. We mentioned that earlier. But ultimately, everything that runs this system being available for analytics, you know, the world's your oyster. Right? It's however you wanna use that data. We have services that can help capitalize on that even more. Right? Tracking kind of benchmarking what other schools that use Emburse are looking as far as the APIs based on the goals and priors that they have. These dashboards being yours to build. They're very intuitive. I'll say that I've built dashboards myself and by no means am I a data scientist. I've been able to figure it out reasonably well, but, you know, it's all it's all there for you. You can do things like year over year. You can zoom in on the data, and really get some really nice looks into the information as you need them. We can build them for you too. So really really kind of a huge value component especially coming from environments where you may not have that, insight off the top of it from starting point. Right? So with this, we we've got some examples queued up for you. So I'm gonna throw it over to Lorrie Black here to talk about some of the teeny challenges that she faced at University of New Mexico, kind of how how this might have been solved. Now go to the next slide here. There we go. Thank you. Hello, everybody. So excited to be here and share some of our experiences here at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. So as stated, my name is Lorrie Black. I'm a senior business analyst with the University of New Mexico. I've been here twenty seven years, and all of my time at UNM has been in the same department. A lot of people at universities have an awesome opportunity to move around to different departments, which is really cool about being at a university. You can be in a student arena, in a finance arena. I just I fell into a really good spot, and I loved it. So that's, that's where I ended up. I we I was here when we implemented our ERP system twenty years ago. I was part of the Chrome River Emburse, enterprise now installation here at UNM back in 2016. And I am the administrator for Emburse Enterprise here at UNM, and I support users as well as our financial services offices. And in 2023, I was, elected by Emburse as their ultimate advocate, which was a really cool honor. I really liked being able to, share my thoughts and ideas with MERS and then to be named as an ultimate advocate for them. So when it comes to Emburse here at UNM, I am a user, but I'm more I have more of a support role to campus. I wanna talk a little bit about how we went from a very manual paper driven process to an electronic process here at UNM. So back in the day when we had paper, our paper routed through many offices. They either were routed via campus mail. They were, hand carried from one office to another. That left us especially campus mail left us open to losing things. We have, five branch campuses and three campuses in Albuquerque close together, our main campus, our South Campus, and our North Campus. Plus there's other areas within Albuquerque that that we have other departments and divisions, but they're not close in campus. So, again, we'd either have to send things via campus mail or take a long walk to a different area of campus or get in a car and drive it somewhere. So paper was just everywhere. We needed wet signatures. So that meant a lot of times I would walk paper to an office, wait for the signature, and then walk it to the next office because I didn't want it to get lost. I wanted to make sure it got done timely. As the paper routed from office to office, we had a huge potential of losing it. Also, a lot of offices would make copies for themselves, so one reimbursement for travel could have as many as four or five copies floating around campus. AP was the final department to get the paperwork. When AP got the paperwork, they'd scan it into our, electronic database, and then they'd send they'd box up hard copies and send it to records management to sit in records forever. So we had scanned copies. We had copies in records. All the offices had their own copies. So you could imagine we were just very paper eccentric people here at University of New Mexico. And if it was wrong at any point in this process, we had to start it all over again at the beginning and rekey it and reprint it and get the wet signatures again. So it took a long time for things to get through. It is really hard about the electronic I'm sorry, about approvals because with wet signatures, it would leave one office, go to the next, and get approved, and then it would leave that office and go to the next and get approved. And we were tracking this stuff as well electronically, but the paper wasn't electronic. We still had to have the paper in front of us before we signed off, and then we had to click approve into our application. So getting a signature and from submit to final payment when the check was cut or direct deposit was processed, it could take two or three weeks. And then, again, we had lack of visibility. We didn't we couldn't always tell where our paperwork was. Our financial services offices did keep a database, and they would check every every piece of paper that came in. They would check all the packets in, and then their office would process it the way they need it to, and then they would check them out. So now we have a person who is handling the paperwork, checking it in, giving it to somebody to sign and approve, and then getting it back and checking it out and putting in an envelope and sending it off to the next office. So that's that's a lot of back and forth. If you can just imagine some type of spiderweb, that's probably what it looked like. So it was a lot of time and a lot of paper. Again, we couldn't track it electronically. We had multiple copies, and then our p card reconciliations was just another whole paper intensive process we worked with because we were managing these things on paper, sending them through so they would get into our ERP, and we could reconcile the transaction. But then when we got our statements at the end of the month, that's when we put all the little receipts and taped them on pieces of paper and attached them to our statement and had a spreadsheet that showed all our transactions with all our receipts. And then I was a pay card holder, so I keep a copy because I never want to lose it for myself. And then my boss would get it, and he would sign it sign off on it. But we needed a copy for the office, so we'd make another copy for the office. And then we'd send it to the p card department. And they, again, would scan it, and then they would send the records to records management. So just our p card reconciliation, at least three copies of each. We did have a homegrown application that our key card holders would use to reconcile their key cards, but, again, they it was still very paper intensive. Let's see. And then you can imagine just the cost of paper and the rings and rings that we went through. It's one of the things I love about Emburse is that you really don't need paper at all. Everything is electronic. Oops. Sorry. Okay. So UNM implemented, Emburse analytics. I'm sorry. Inverse Enterprise. And you're gonna hear me say Chrome River because it was Chrome River when we went live, and I'm really trying to be good about switching over because they are branded. And Inverse Enterprise does really encompass so much more of what they do. One of the things we liked with Emburse was the ability, to have p card integrations, submit warnings and, submit compliance warnings, notifications for our users, and electronic grabbings. We needed a tool that would provide flexibility for all types of expenses, not just travel. We have we pay students. We pay nonemployees. We have travel. We have out of pocket reimbursements, and we have our p card reconciliations. And we needed it to route electronically. We wanted to get out of the paper mess. The electronic routings needed to give us visibility of where the paper or where the transaction was at any point in, approval process. One of the great things about implementing pcard was we were able to ditch the statements. Now we reconcile transactions as they hit our e wallet. We do not reconcile As a cardholder, we do not reconcile to a statement. Our p card administrative office still manages all of that on their side, but for a p cardholder, I don't have to reconcile my transactions twice anymore. We've implemented line item and submit compliance warnings, which is great because as I'm keying something, no matter what it is, and I put something in and I select an allocation or I select a particular tile, and it will drive me. And it'll say you can't do it this way, or it'll say instead of doing this, do this. So I'm able to complete a report correctly the first time, which is a big win for us. We use lots of notifications via report scheduler. We're getting ready to come up on our fiscal year end, and so we'll start doing daily notifications on some of the processes we do here at University of New Mexico because we'll wanna make sure we get everything in before the close of the year, June 30. So we turn on daily notifications to remind our p card holders, hey. You have this these transactions you need to reconcile. We may turn on notifications to say these reports are routed through approvals. You need to stay on top of it and make sure they get completed and approved and exported before fiscal year end. And then, what I like most about Emburse is that it is completely configurable. I can change these messages at year end. I could change them at calendar year end. I can change them during key times when it's things are like, maybe the beginning of the school semester and we know that our offices are really, really busy. We can send messages to help them. Did you know this, or can we help you with that? Those type of messages are really helpful to our end users. We're able to lock down allocations based on expense type. So if I'm trying to reimburse somebody for travel, I can't use an allocation that is slated for books. So they're they're never gonna key that incorrectly because they only have the option to use travel allocations. That's a that's a big win there. I think I'm gonna go back a slide. Sorry. Let me just talk a little bit more about this. We're more visible with our policy compliance rules. It's so easy to change and create rules or demise rules you don't need anymore, and we do this based on policy. We have some policy edits coming online here in the next month or so, and I've already written the compliance messages for these new policies. They're not turned on yet, but as soon as policy goes into effect, effect, I'll be able to turn them on, and we'll help people, understand why they can or cannot do something because of policy. We've also looked at these and run reports on how many times these, compliance rules fire because maybe we have some compliance rules that are firing all the time. So it's do we change the policy, or do we turn off the rule? We don't we don't want people to get the same rule every time they submit a report. So these are really, again, really easy to do. We empower our people to do it right the first time, and I just I can't speak enough about this because it's so great to submit a report and get it done and get it approved and get it exported the first time rather than so much back and forth. And I'm confident in saying that usually when a report is returned, it's probably just because the business purpose doesn't have enough information in it, which maybe AI in the future could help us with these, building these descriptions. They're not business purposes. Also, maybe because it's missing receipts. But for the most part, anything they have to select when doing a reimbursement or a payment or a p card reconciliation, that's all gonna be correct because we're driving them correctly. So our core accounting office approvers have the ability to reassign, transactions to another approver. And now we've just implemented in the last year what we refer to as ad hoc approvals. And we had been pushing for this since go live in 2016, and it became a reality. Thank you, Emburse, and we love it. So we have the ability to add an additional approver ad hoc. Taylor, I'm sorry. Can you confirm my slides are showing? Somebody just said they weren't showing. Thank you. Lost my place. So with this, ad hoc approver, I can approve something and and know it's okay, but maybe I want my boss or somebody else to take a look and and just, hey. I want you to see that they did this, and it's okay, but I just wanna call it to your attention. So having the ad hoc approver allows me to approve and then to send it to somebody else to approve as well. And then once that person approves, it'll pick right back up where it started. Ad hoc approvers little is different than reassign because I am not giving away my approval. I'm still approving the document. I'm just asking for another set of eyes on it. I see maybe this is good for our area if we're doing travel reimbursements. And maybe if they're over $500, the dean wants to see them, but he doesn't care if they're 400. So in this case, I have a $400 reimbursement for travel. I'll approve it, and it'll go to the next approver. But if it's 500, I'll approve it and send it on to the dean just so that he can see it. That's an example I would use here at University of New Mexico. And then it's also we have better tracking and visibility for our fiscal year end and for our audits because everything is right there and everybody can see reports in real time. So our overall impact and results and I'm taking these figures from our first year because those are the ones I have, and I'm really confident in these numbers. We saw a 75% reduction in reimbursement time. That is huge for staff. We were we are saving from go live 35,000 a year in time spent in walking this paper back and forth, printing wet signatures, finding stuff, losing stuff. Thirty five thousand hours a year. That's a that's huge. We figured we saved about 800,000 sheets of paper. That's about 96 trees. So we're, saving the environment. We, shared these this information a few years ago at our ERP conference, and it was in New Orleans at the time. So we figured stacking the paper, one sheet on top of another, we'd be able to fill the Silverdome from board to ceiling. We have greater adoption across campus due to the ease of use. So now people who would take all their receipts to an admin and say, hey. Reimburse me. They're more willing to take a picture of their receipt and start their reimburse reimbursement report and then do it all electronically. Okay. So my advice to you and our lessons learned, focus on the positives. You're always gonna have naysayers in the room, but focus on the positives. And don't let the naysayers stop you or get you down. Electronic approvals and routings no longer require me to be on campus to get my job done. This was huge amongst COVID in 2020. Somebody said that I don't I can't remember the exact way they stated it, but they said they they could be socially distance distant from their reimbursement during COVID. So they could do everything from home and still get reimbursed. You can easily edit approval groups and routings. You can add ad hoc approvers for unique cases. You can do use delegate approvers, Warning messages and compliance messages are easy to configure and set up and update and change. You can add links on a lot of our warning messages. I have direct links to our policy, so they can click on that link and get directly to where they need to in policy so they can see why we are not letting them do something. And employees can enter the system the first day. In the past, in our old system, they had to take some training, then they had to get security, and they had to get approval. It could take a week or two after a person started working before they could actually do their job. When we went live, we reached out to departments, and we asked for champions. We were looking for champions of change, and these people are in the trenches. They know the challenges. They know what's going on in their departments, and they were able to help us build our, job aids, build our SOPs, and they help their staff. They're first level of contact for departments, and we still point users to those people today. One of the great things we saw is that a professor and a CFO this was, like, four days after go live. A professor and our CFO were ecstatic to get paid the same day they submitted their request. They submitted it. It got through approvals, and it reached our accounts payable office before the end of the day, before they ran direct deposit, and they got their payment notification. In the past, could have taken three weeks. We've turned a lot less p cards because we're able to drive the p card users correctly on using their cards. We have shared services offices now around campus that support over 50 departments because of the efficiencies granted gained with Chrome River with Emburse. Sorry. Because of efficiencies gained, we have the service offices that can help several areas. Online help is at your fingertips. You just have to click on the little question mark, and it's great. If you're not using inverse help guides, I encourage you to. Well, it's not specific to your company. It doesn't have your company logo. The rules are the same. And then use your reports. Use analytics. There's so many great reports out there. And if you have the Analytics Pro, you're able to take those and customize them to fit your needs. If you don't have Pro, you can still use the reports. There's lots of good information. I think I might have jumped just a little bit ahead of mine. Okay? Alright. Thanks, Lorrie. It's definitely a few sorry. Go ahead. No. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. I said I said a few things there that, you know, definitely interested in diving a little bit deeper on. I think the the key number that I heard was the 75% reduction in the in the reimbursement time. I think saw a few markers in there from the paper process, the automated route that you were working on that helped, I think get there. But is there any advice specifically on that that you wanna give to other institutions as to how to shorten those turnaround times? Don't don't make your approval groups queues so complicated. You don't need I I'll boldly say you don't need 15 people approving a transaction. So a lot of times, things get held up in approvals because it's routing and routing and routing. Look at your approval groups and see what you can do to simplify those. Yeah. I think that's a a key point. Oftentimes, we're talking to, you know, new prospects coming off of systems that have historically worked but had challenges. They'll they'll, really wanna stick to exactly what they were doing. But there's opportunity to really simplify things and, you know, do we have to have seven people seeing this expense report or can we only have that happen when it's over a given threshold. Right? So not being nailed into exactly what you're doing, but you being, you know, open to best practices and and, you know, there's gonna be benefits moving to an automated system to begin with. But, you know, the the more optimized you can make your process within that, you can you can reap better benefits. Right. And and that's a good point. Don't bring your old process into your new one. That you're here to simplify it and make it make it more streamlined, so look at that. Look at where you can streamline it. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's a good opportunity to to change the way that it works. Right? Just because you've been doing it, I mean, you need to do it the exact same way when you have better tools at your disposal. So Correct. So the next one, you mentioned the kind of submission warnings and notifications playing a big role in that. Can you expand on how how those helped with the the policy violations, the errors? So by driving your users to do the report correctly the first time or getting the information you need the first time really helps streamline these delayed approvals. And some of our warning messages will state, okay. You've done this. Now we need this and this and this. And they'll put that information in the response of the compliance message. So when it gets to the approvals, they have all that information right there. Instead of sending the report back and telling them, you know, put it here or add this or we need this, they're able to add it right there and keep moving forward. I'll be honest. We still struggle with the 1%. People don't read the compliance messages. We'll have a compliance message that says, please explain why this, and they'll say noted. And it's like, it doesn't really explain what we need. So then when it gets to the approvers, they have to send it back to get that information. But, you know, those those are handled within the particular offices, and they'll take you on that on their side. And, again, most of our warning messages are just asking for clarification or just a gentle reminder that they need to do something. Hey. You've selected this. Don't forget you need to attach this. And it just means payments are processed faster because approvals happen faster. Yeah. I think the the key piece of that they mentioned too is it's meeting them at the point of the creation. Right? It's not waiting for someone downstream to notice the discrepancy. They're being notified as as they're creating these items. They can't help the 1% necessarily, but most people when they keep running into a rule, they'll they'll start to just do things to avoid that rule. Right? You can tell them tell them and yeah. You can make hard stops as well. So there's the warning violations. You can say, hey. This can't resubmit it as is. Please do this before we we get there. And of course, as he's mentioned, it's all elevated downstream. So you're not you're not looking for the needle in the haystack. It's kinda elevating it to you. Right. So the the last one, right, is a few metrics you mentioned. We already hit on the the 75% earlier on, but, you know, there's the the time savings, the paper reduction, the award recognition. From from your perspective, what's the the the kind of biggest impact on the financial oversight or leadership decision making at UNM? Well, I'm gonna say no paper. It's it's really crazy because I worked for I worked for a person. My supervisor was a no paper person at all. I mean, you go in his office and no paper. You take a piece of paper in his office and you left with that piece of paper because he didn't want it. So no paper is huge. But that also means you're not printing. You're not filing. You're not scanning. You're not figuring out where to keep storage. And then when you when somebody leaves the department, you're not trying to figure out with all what to do with all that paper sitting in their desk. It's completely configurable to meet your needs, and it's okay to change it. If you if you have these rules and they're working great, that's wonderful. But if you have these rules and it's like, well, I'm not sure it's quite working the way we want it to, you can change it. It's so easy. Guide users to navigate through the reports efficiently and help them get it done right the first time. You know, we you're always gonna have those users. They're gonna try and slide something under because it got through once six years ago, and so they think they can always do it. And, again, those are your 1%. Don't focus on those. Focus on all the people that are doing all the hard work in getting it done right the first time. And it being a completely electronic system, you're able to see a report at any stage. If it's exported, approved, pending, draft, things in e wallets, it's really great to have that power at your fingertips. Travelers don't need to wait until they return to start getting sorry, to start getting their reimbursements. Yeah. I just it's where I came from the paper world, this is just thousands times better. We love to hear it, Lorrie. I appreciate you sharing your story and your journey within the t and e process and and within Emburse here. I do wanna open it up to some chat questions here. I wanna make sure, we address some of these. Real quick, Lorrie, can you tell everybody, what ERP system you use and if it's integrated, and if HR is integrated with the ERP. Yes. We use Banner, and we do have HR, module student finance. Those are modules of banner. Awesome. That was a question we saw from a couple of folks there. So, one of the other questions we had was, you stated that thousands of hours were saved. Did you find that people were no longer needed with this process or, being simplified? And with the rise of AI, how has this affected your staff? It's funny. You always get that question. Oh, it's gonna be selfish. You don't need you don't need me anymore. No. That that was far from true. We we needed everybody and more. And part of it is now these people that are that were doing, you know, taping receipts to pieces of paper and copying them and scanning them, and those those individuals, so that staff, they had an opportunity to do other things as well as just, you know, working on a reimbursement. They were able to maybe process journal entries or maybe look at, HR processes within their department. Or, there's just there's so much we do. We don't have just one person that does just travel. That one person may do travel and journal vouchers and HR entries and timekeeping, all kinds of stuff. So it just freed up some more time for them to do some of their other duties too. Yeah. I I wanted to raise that question in particular because it's one we hear often in the conversations with AI is there is this concern that, it will take away from jobs. But we do find that it does actually simply improve that work balance and allows those people to focus on the things that they actually specialize in. So it's just an additional tool. It's by no means, the solution. Right? But it is an extra tool to have in your belt. Yes. And to add some color to that, I think, you know, one one concept I've always heard is that no one comes out of college to be an accountant want wanting to do manual data entry. Right? So if you take that out of their lap and then all of a sudden you give them new analytics visibility they can use, they can spend time doing kind of looking forward things with that as opposed to, you know, catch raindrops trying to try to keep things in. Awesome. Yep. Yep. We have some questions around the workflows and the notifications that you set up. So, Toby Davis asked, within the automated workflow, from a p card process, what roles did you include? Specifically, he, we have highlighted was it p card to AP review, to spend authority, to ERP. They're curious to know how you have set those up, if you can highlight that a little bit more. Sure. So we are unlike a lot of areas. Our AP department is not an approver. Things get to AP approved and ready for payment. And I know probably a lot of people, you know, like, gasping in the audience because I see that all the time. How can your AP department not be approving? So what happens with, like, a PCAR transaction? I reconcile my transaction, and it goes to my department approvers. It doesn't go to a supervisor. It goes to department approvers because they're the ones that are aware of the the funds and the monies and, you know, the transactions that are going through our system. And then from there, for p cards specifically, once the department approves, the p card transaction then goes to the p card office, and they're looking at policy. They wanna make sure my receipts are attached, that I have that I'm following policy, and I'm not abusing my purchasing power. Once the pay card office approves, it exports to our ERP. There are some transactions that will route through, our inventory department for approval if it requires a tag or some transactions that will route to our contracting grant accounting area. If there are particular, things we've purchased on a p card that's on a grant. Not everything, but some things where it needs that, second level of look before it goes to the p card office. Perfect. And I got the we have a comment in the chat for that reply. Toby says, thank you. That is exactly what I was looking for. So awesome. Thank you very much, Lorrie. You're welcome. We also have a question here. I think this one, might be better suited for you, Mike. Angela Miller is asking, would it be possible to set up Emburse to make the submitted reports searchable from our view all submitted profile list? Is is that a list that's in in banner or somewhere else? So and I'll I'll start to answer. I guess, I'll get a little bit more context on where that view all this would be. But, ultimately, everything in the oh, sorry. Do you do you have the expansion of that? They're asking specifically if it can be set up in in verse. So, Angela, if you could clarify, it's accessed from our Emburse main screen is what Angela said. Oh, okay. Yeah. So the view all submitted, that view is is when you're in your own dashboard, you can see anything that you as a user have sent through. It's always visible there. You can see your own expenses, who they sit with, you need to bug maybe to to ask about where that approval is, things that are, you know, tracking on, you know, who's approving next. Do you have that visibility? There's also an inquiry section in Emburse that'll let you do kind of some reporting on your own expenses. You can look at a line item basis, preapproval basis, expense report basis, and it'll give you some insight into a kind of a broader list of those. That's for the end user. Of course, as we talk about analytics, you have full visibility to basically anything you might want. You can schedule reports out as well. So if you do have a list and for some reason you need to give that kind of visibility to someone who isn't the owner of those expenses, you could schedule, kind of you know, you can use the user themselves as a filter, the the stage of the report, the date range on a report to send whoever needs that visibility. That report is maybe a a regular cadence as well. Not sure if I it'll be back to there. If if I could just add to that real quickly. Sorry. Yeah. Go for it. So when when we open up submitted, you know, submitted reports, we've been live since 2016, so, obviously, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and you've gotta endlessly scroll. You only have the ability to to switch how it's presented to you date wise. So we have asked for, like, that to be searchable, and I know there is a request in for an enhancement to that. So Perfect. Thank you, Lorrie. Yes. That was what Angela was referring to. We do love to hear that feedback, so I will definitely, escalate that to the team. Thank you. Sorry for answering the wrong question there. It's helpful to No. I put you on the spike the spot, Mike. Thank you. Perfect. I think we have time for one more question here. Let me just go through. I know we had a couple in the chat, so I wanna make sure those are getting attention as well. There is one question here. Lawrence, Carosi, and I apologize if I butcher any names, asked how, how do you handle prepaid and future events? Lorrie, can you kinda talk a little bit about that? So for, prepaid, I'm I'm gonna put that around travel. So conference fees, we definitely encourage users to use a key card to pay for conference fees, airfare, anything that has to be prepaid in regards to travel. If I decide I wanna pay for it out of pocket because I wanna get points on my credit card, I will not be reimbursed until the event is done. They're not gonna reimburse me in case I don't go. So that's how we handle the prepaid stuff, and it's it's our policy. They cannot be reimbursed for anything before it happens, and that is why we have the ability for them to use company credit cards. Well, I think, unfortunately, I don't think we have time to get through any other questions here. But I do wanna thank everybody for the incredible engagement and insightful questions. We appreciate you joining us for our webinar here today. If you if you asked a question and and we didn't get to it, we will reach out after the webinar to try and answer that to the best of our ability. And we thank you for joining us today. I hope you have a good rest of your Thursday, everybody. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you.