Monitor and Improve Your Department’s Expense Request Efficacy
With eight dashboards and a myriad of reports available, Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) offers users many helpful tools at their fingertips depending on their needs. In this issue, we spotlight one dashboard built to monitor and improve your department’s expense request efficacy and ensure good financial stewardship.
The Expense Request Efficacy (ERE) Dashboard provides reporting and analysis of expense request (ER) approval, return and rejection rates and reasons, and ER processing lead times and throughput. Users can view the data in both tabular and graphical formats and drill down into specific ERs for deeper investigation.
The dashboard can be particularly helpful for spotting trends and issues requiring attention, leading to opportunities for improvements in training, policy, and resource allocation. For example, you can use the dashboard analysis to:
- Monitor the accuracy rate and cycle time of ER processing
- Identify bottlenecks where long processing times are causing problems and where resource allocation could be adjusted
- Identify the most frequent causes of returns or rejections to inform processing/training improvements and optimize for lower rejection rates and fewer escalations
- Review processing times by months and years (as shown in the ER Processing Stats Report screenshot below) for trends and seasonality to assist in management planning
ERE Dashboard Success Stories: Computer Science and Pathology Departments
Several Stanford departments have been utilizing the ERE Dashboard to great effect in managing workload and troubleshooting rejections.
The Computer Science department’s finance and operations staff studied ER activity across the administrative support team to see which faculty administrators might have a heavier workload than others. After reviewing, they redistributed support to the faculty and identified which administrators might need more guidance or support with ERs.
The Pathology department's operations staff assessed several years of ERE dashboard data to find insights into areas for improvement. This led them to centralize their TCard, PCard, advances, and ER system to use only two ER originators, resulting in their monthly rejection rate decreasing from 34%+ to 6%. The department also uses the dashboard data to help identify reasons for ER rejections, manage their aging transactions, and develop checklists.
Learn More and Get Support
For detailed instruction on how to use the dashboard’s six specific tabs and various reports, please refer to the ER Efficacy User Guide.
For more support and guidance on using the ERE Dashboard to meet your organization's business goals, consider making an appointment with OBI Open Lab. In addition, the FMS Business Strategy and Services (BSS) group can offer consulting support to departments using ERE data to improve business processes and policy compliance (please fill out the general Financial Support Center support request with details in the required field to ask for BSS consulting assistance).
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