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News, Enhancements & Tips for Financial Reporting at Stanford

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
Screenshot of ER Processing Stats report

 

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).

OBI Open Lab Offers Invaluable 
Real-time Personalized Assistance


Learn how to best utilize Oracle Business Intelligence’s (OBI) various reporting and analysis tools to achieve your department’s goals by turning to the experts of OBI Open Lab. In addition to resources (such as online courses, How To instructions, and videos), OBI users can take advantage of the Open Lab to get live one-on-one customized support for OBI financial reporting-related questions. 

Many of our Open Lab users have received invaluable help on dashboards, BI Publisher reports, ad hoc analysis, and more. In this newsletter and future issues, hear directly from your fellow colleagues on how OBI Open Lab has helped their teams make high quality business decisions.
Photo of Emily Henry
 
"OBI Open Lab is very helpful because it can answer your specific questions and save you lots of time rather than testing many options on your own. They taught me how to add a specific filter to a custom query that solved my reporting issue." 
– Emily Henry, Associate Director of Finance, Office of the President and Provost

Use Support Requests to Ask Brief OBI Questions


Submitting an OBI Financial Reporting support request is a great way to ask quick OBI finance questions without reserving an hour of Open Lab time. The requests route to OBI specialists in the Financial Support Center (FSC), and if they are unable to answer the question, requests are then escalated to Open Lab instructors.

Ready to submit a support request to FSC OBI specialists? The support request link is located on every OBI Finance Dashboard report page in the upper left corner, as shown below.

 
Screenshot of support request link in OBI Dashboard PLM report page

Turning Your Feedback Into Action:
OBI Financial Reporting Survey Results

FMS conducted two surveys related to financial reporting in 2021: an OBI Financial Reporting Survey which took a deep dive into product functionality and the user experience, and the FMS Client Satisfaction Survey which focused primarily on training and support.

The survey results highlighted three main areas of opportunity, which were to improve:

  1. Performance of the OBI platform
  2. Ease of use of the OBI financial reports suite
  3. New reports and functionality

Learn how the OBI Financial Reporting team has taken steps to address your feedback and create initiatives for future improvements in this Fingate article.

Financial Approver Toolkit Available

Financial transaction approvers play a very important role at Stanford in ensuring proper financial stewardship and expense documentation. In addition to an updated course and checklists, we gathered helpful reporting tools in one place, such as View PTA Details, Pending Transactions, and Inquiry Tool: Requisition and Purchase Order Query. Learn more about the new Approver Toolkit.

Reminders

Update Processes that Use Agents to Automatically Upload OBI Reports to Box

University IT has previously announced plans to retire Stanford University’s use of Box. In addition to migrating your shared files from Box to other university-approved collaboration and file-sharing platforms, please remember to develop alternative processes for getting OBI reports uploaded to file storage.

Some groups use OBI agents to automatically run reports and upload them to Box via email attachment, but the other collaboration and file sharing platforms, such as Google Drive, do not intrinsically support this functionality. Processes that use this functionality with Box will fail after the Dec. 1, 2022 Box migration, so users should investigate other options for achieving their needs.







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