Who

UMC Business Office would like to recognize Amy Cole’s innovation and efficiency, and to recognize her great problem solving skills. Amy developed a streamlined, electronic, paperless coding process for quicker and easier End of Month (EOM) Journal Entry (JE) batches for UMC Events Planning & Catering (EP&C) invoices. This process improves the efficiency by standardizing the coding, eliminating the handwriting errors and improving the accuracy. It makes the reconciliation after EOM close so much easier and faster as well.

What

Save Time: For each invoice, it now only takes 2 to 3 seconds to copy and paste the coding to PDF invoice, while it used to take about 15 to 20 seconds by hand. There are about 300 to 500 invoices per month for EP&C catering and rental orders. Therefore, this process saves us several hours of handwriting each month.

Standardize the Coding: We just need to change some certain specific description for each invoice when we input the coding to the spreadsheet, which is customized to be copied and pasted to JE uploader provided by CCO. 

Eliminate Errors and Improve Accuracy: We match total coded orders for each day and the daily tally spreadsheet, sort the total debits and credits for each revenue category so that we catch mistakes before we post the batches. Therefore, this process tremendously eliminates the coding errors and ensures accuracy. 

Improve the Customer Service: This process increases the transparency and improves the customer service, by attaching the coded invoices to the JE with hundreds of lines. 

Why

This process is used to save paper, to eliminate numerical errors, and to increase efficiency. Instead of printing the final invoices and daily summaries, after EP&C finishes their audit process, we save the files in PDF format to folders located at a shared drive. We copy and paste the payment methods from EATEC/EMS billing notes to final invoice PDF files, eliminating the handwriting errors. Besides, this process increases communication within the team because everyone has access to all the files. This is extremely helpful when we only have limited time to post the EOM JEs.

Where

This process is used for the billing process in EATEC and EMS mainly for CU EP&C catering and room rental orders, respectively. We are getting some space back since we are not storing so many documents now. We are starting to incorporate EP&C into this process by asking them to email electronic IN’s, rather than print and bring them to the office, saving them time and effort as well. We think that this paperless coding process can also be used for other organizations, which have large volume of invoices to be coded, batched and posted to PeopleSoft.

When

This electronic coding process has been used since mid of July 2017 during the carpet/painting project. We were looking for some procedures so we could remotely work from home. Amy found that we could copy and paste the coding onto the invoice PDF file and save the coded invoices in folders located at a shared drive, after we input the speed types and accounts to the spreadsheet. We liked this process so much that we started to use it after we returned to office when the carpet/painting project was completed. 

Submitter's Information

Submitter's Name: Peggy Tucker Ortega​
Submitter's Email: Peggy.Tucker@Colorado.edu​
Submitter's Org: University Memorial Center Business and Accounting Office, University of Colorado Boulder