Excellence in
Financial Stewardship
Stanford Financial Management Services provides this quarterly newsletter as a part of its vision to inspire and enable excellence in financial stewardship.
Issue 1 | February 2021
What is Excellence in Financial Stewardship?
Stewardship is the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care. At Stanford, financial stewardship means ensuring that university resources are used appropriately, in support of the mission, and comply with policies, laws, and sponsor or donor intent.

Though sound financial management is critical to the long-term health of any institution, Stanford also strives to continue delivering excellence in financial stewardship. This excellence is achieved through a resounding commitment to its mission and a constant evolution of the financial ecosystem that supports it.

Employees, including faculty and staff, with responsibilities for financial management are held to a higher standard in ensuring financial integrity and excellence. My hope is that this newsletter provides you with resources and practices to support you in your role and toward our broader pursuit of excellence in financial stewardship.

Future issues will focus on best practices and tips for managing specific business activities including: purchasing, card programs and transaction monitoring. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future topics for this newsletter, and encourage you to share the subscription link with your colleagues.
Anne Sweeney-Hoy
Senior Associate Vice President of Finance

Everyone Plays a Role

Whether you are a preparer, approver, finance manager, fund owner, or an employee with oversight of Stanford’s resources, you have a critical role to play in safeguarding the university’s resources. Below are the key places where you can learn more about how and what you do directly supports our financial ecosystem.

Financial Management Services (FMS) provides additional information about tools and support services that enable financial stewardship on the Fingate website. Preparers and approvers may reference Authority to Approve Financial Transactions and Reimbursement and Expense Requests Roles and Responsibilities to review how their roles support excellence in financial stewardship.

University HR also maintains an Annual Policy Reminder page featuring key employment-related policies and resources that should be reviewed regularly.

Monitoring and Mitigating Financial Risk

A key part of financial stewardship is ensuring the appropriate controls, processes, and checks and balances are in place and working effectively. Aside from regular risk assessments and evaluations, there are best practices you can utilize to monitor and mitigate risk:
Best Practices
  • Leverage training and resources to ensure staff are aware of their roles, responsibilities, and how financial processes and policies work. Visit the Financial Learning Center on Fingate for courses, demos and learning resources.
     
  • Utilize reporting and tracking tools to perform reviews and reconciliations that will help you identify anomalies. Stanford’s Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) system offers many reporting solutions and drill down tools.
     
  • Monitor financial approval authority delegations to ensure that the scope of authority and associated dollar limits are aligned with the responsibilities of the approver. As a best practice, financial delegations should be set at a level appropriate for the normal activities for which the approver has responsibility. For example, if most transactions are $5,000 or less, set the financial delegation at $5,000 and designate the occasional transaction above that amount to be approved by the next level of management.
     
  • If you see something, say something. Administrative Guide Memo 3.5.1: Financial Irregularities outlines the  procedures to follow when a suspicion or discovery of financial irregularities arise. Concerns can be reported confidentially or anonymously through helpline.stanford.edu.

Helpful Resources and Tools

Stanford Financial Management Services continuously improves upon the tools, systems and services needed to support the university’s financial ecosystem. Below are a few new or recently updated resources to support continued financial stewardship excellence.

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