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Higher education institutions and K12 schools are required to comply with a variety of government laws, regulations, and oversight. However, many schools have multiple outdated, on-premises legacy finance systems that contain faculty, staff, and sometimes even student spending data. Before this data can be used by a school, it must first be manually combined in a spreadsheet.

This can make it difficult for your school to:

• See how your money is being spent and by whom.
• Review and control faculty and staff spend before it happens.
• Enforce and improve compliance with spend policies.
• Spot data patterns that may be hidden across channels or systems.
• Actively identify and mitigate spend fraud, abuse, and waste.

The Answer? Modernize and Automate

To overcome these issues, higher education institutions and K12 schools need to modernize their systems so they can automate spend control and improve compliance.

When your school does, you will be able to:

• Capture digital records and improve the accuracy of expense reports.
• Insert controls at the point of purchase to reduce fraud and manage non-compliance.
• Gain visibility into future travel and spend with spend requests and approvals.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically review expense and receipt data.

More importantly, it will provide your school with more clarity and certainty so you can make better and more informed decisions about spend.

Then¡­Audit Spend

When spending happens, higher education institutions and K12 schools must also have the right tools, procedures, and processes in place to audit faculty and staff spend and expense reports. Because doing an audit manually can be time-consuming and expensive,

these schools should look for a technology solution that can simultaneously automate the audit process and improve efficiency and compliance.

Best Practices for Inserting Spend Controls to Achieve Compliance

As your school continues to digitize its spend management systems, be sure to apply best practices for spend control to ensure compliance, such as:

• Create straight forward travel and expense spend policies. Make sure these encourage spending that supports your school¡¯s goals.
• Provide ongoing training on your school¡¯s travel and expense policies and tools. This will enable your faculty and staff to make more policy-compliant spend choices.
• Require pre-spend authorization before spending occurs. Have managers review spending for airfare, hotels, car rentals, etc., in advance to prevent non-compliant activity.
• Use an online booking tool with built-in policy by traveler. Restrict different types of travelers¡¯ ability to select out-of-policy options to increase compliance and modify behavior.
• Use an expense reporting system with built-in policies and user guidance. Insert spending thresholds, flags, and other automatic notifications to help guide users when filling out expense reports. This can help prevent and identify non-compliant behaviors (e.g., lack of documentation, overspending, unauthorized use of expense types, etc.).
• Use mobile receipt capture and point-to-point GPS mileage tracking. Not only will this eliminate the need to scan or attach paper receipts to an expense report and ensure accurate mileage reporting, but it also increases the accuracy of data entry.
• Regularly conduct audits to ensure compliance with your policies. This will help you identify any areas where training may be needed.
• Implement robust reporting to analyze spend and make improvements.

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Now is a great time to update your school¡¯s systems and automate spend management. Not only can a great spend management solution help your school enforce important spend controls and gain more visibility into faculty and staff spend, but it will also increase compliance with your school¡¯s spend policies.

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Want to learn more?

For K-12, download the tip sheet: 7 Essentials for Bringing Control and Compliance to Unmanaged Spend.

For Higher Education, read the brochure: Better Audits, Better Results: 3 Ways to Control Spend and Create a Culture of Compliance Across Your Campus