Description: The Federal Government reimburses the campus for the significant amount of its equitable share of Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs associated with conducting organized research. Space costs represent more than 50% of the reimbursement; therefore, completing a reasonable space survey is expected by the University and the Federal Government.
Description: A team comprised of individuals from the Budget Office (Erika Smith, Dana Takeuchi, Linh-Thong Lo, Joy Vidalon, and Kristina Berg) and Accounting and Business Support (Laura Ragin, Leila McCamey, Elizabeth Spencer, Jenny Shao, and Rebekah Martino) completely overhauled the process by which internal sales (sales between university departments) are conducted on the Boulder campus. This involved in-depth analyses of three years-worth of historical financial data, issue identification, examination of current policies and procedures, research into policies and practices at peer institutions, development of new policies for the Boulder campus, communication with the campus community including senior management, and working with campus units to implement the new rules. This project has been entirely created and led by the Budget and Accounting offices and done without additional staff or operational resources.
Description: The Office of the University Controller offers Continuing Professional Education (CPE) courses to University employees as well as professionals from the local community. The courses are offered on a regular basis throughout the year. A majority of the course attendees are Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and require these courses to maintain CPA certification. As a result, the University is required to issue certificates to each of the attendees to document completion of the course. When the courses were first offered, issuing the certificates was a manual process. Each certificate had to be hand signed by the CPE administrator.
Description: Our Residence Life department consists of 54 staff members who use the Procurement card to make about 400 purchases a month for student development programs in the Residence Halls. For fiscal year 2013, Hall Directors used an individual paper chit to capture the business purpose, comments, speedtype, and account code. Upon completion, they would physically take the chit and receipt to the Administrative Assistant, which took about five minutes of time. Next the admin would type the information into another departmental form, scan the form and receipt together, and save the pdf to the interdepartmental network, taking another 10 minutes. In cases where receipts were missing or purchase information was delayed, additional time might be needed. Finally, one more admins would upload the form to Concur and copy and paste the information into the fields in Concur, taking another five minutes per expense. Each purchase took about 20 minutes to process, or about 133 hours per month and about 500 sheets of paper.
Description: At UCCS the cash transfer JEs and new ChartField requests are a centralized process. After fiscal year-end close, I was responsible for disposing outdated records which included backup documents for the cash transfers and ChartField requests. While making several trips to the recycle bin to dispose of these documents, I saw resources being wasted and thought there should be a better way. I had already requested that campus personnel send their requests for cash transfers and new ChartField setups by email. Unfortunately, there are as many different ways to ask for cash transfers as there are people. Deciphering exactly what each request was trying to accomplish (e.g., SpeedTypes involved, amounts transferred, and business purpose for each request) took quite a bit of time and back-and-forth communications. To bring uniformity to the cash transfer requests, I created a Multi Cash Transfer template.
Description: Scriptbuilder is an MS-Word template I created shortly after joining the Employee Learning and Development (ELD) team. Using MS-Word “quick parts,” styles, and other MS-Word features, I created the tool to improve the production and consistency of our course development scripts used by ELD instructional designers (ID), HTML developers (HD) and our client subject matter experts (SME). With this tool IDs can quickly design a course script that closely matches the HTML screens of a finished online course. SME’s and other stake holders can gain a better understanding of what the finished course will look like once it’s uploaded to SkillSoft. HTML developers, using our associated course shell, can easily develop the web pages by applying complementary library objects and CSS within the shell.
This week, we saw three new best practice submissions complete the vetting process -- and be honored with posting on the CU Shared Practices (CUSP) website:
