- Procurement/payables
This team should include purchasing buyers, disbursements clerks and managers, departmental administrators who are responsible for departmental purchasing, representatives from shipping/receiving, and perhaps some faculty members who are involved with procurement for sponsored research projects. This team will need to evaluate and recommend changes to the way the institution requisitions, purchases, receives, inventories, and approves payments for goods and services, examining the roles of the different offices and individuals, the institutional needs being met by each step, the amount of approval and control that is necessary, and alternative processes that could be used. The priority, as with each of the business process evaluation teams, is to continue to meet institutional requirements with a minimal amount of duplication of effort, exploiting technology tools as facilitators in gathering, processing, and using data.
- General accounting
This team should include representatives from the accounting office who have responsibility for generating the institution's financial statements, individuals from departments and schools who provide and supply accounting information within their areas, internal audit staff if available, budget/financial analysis providers, and others from departments who are regular users of the institution's financial records (such as the fundraising office, the president or governing board area, major research centers, and so forth). This team will evaluate the institution's current chart of accounts and accounting transaction management, and recommend necessary changes to the chart and to the processing of transactions, both for financial reporting purposes and for day-to-day management.
- Personnel/payroll/benefits
This team should include representatives of the human resources area, particularly those involved with the addition and deletion of employees from institutional records; managers and clerks who deal with the generation of paychecks for faculty, staff, students, and other affiliates of the institution; representatives of the benefits processing area who rely on payroll/ personnel records for eligibility information; department administrators who feed payroll information on individual employees into the payroll system, both from major institutional units who process significant amounts of information and from smaller units whose challenges will be of a different magnitude; and representatives from the institutional research area or other offices who rely on this information for counts of employees, dollars spent, benefits accrued, etc. This group will need to consider how employee data move from inception to paycheck, benefit accrual, and termination, and consider all the appropriate subsystems that support these processes.
- Receivables
This team should include representatives of both the general receivables and student receivables operations, as well as the financial aid area; administrators from departments that are major suppliers of services and therefore rely on the accounts receivable operation; institutional research and budget/financial analysis representatives who will rely on this information (particularly student receivables data) in projecting the financial status of the institution; and representatives of affiliated areas who receive bills from the institution for the provision of services (e.g., student organizations that are separately incorporated, purchase services from the institution, and are billed through the receivables process). This group should examine both how transactions are entered (as well as how the delivery of these billing services is perceived) and the methods of accessing and using the resulting data.
- Investment/gift accounting
This team should include representatives from the investment management function, individuals from the general accounting area who rely on the investment reporting structure for financial reports, fundraising office representatives who have some responsibility for gift processing and reporting, representatives of affiliated institutions who may process their own fundraising proceeds, those responsible for cash management of the institution, a representative of the cashiering function, and an internal audit representative if appropriate. For some institutions, a connection with the working capital and/or custodian bank will also be helpful.
- Operating and capital budget/planning
This team should include budget/financial analysts, administrators from both large and small departments who are responsible for the generation and submittal of departmental/school budgets, representatives of the facilities area who manage capital projects, and those from the investment area who are responsible for the management of capital funding sources.
- Grants and contracts management
Representatives from departments who are major generators of grant and contract activity should make up the bulk of the team. In addition, it will be useful to include representatives from the general accounting area who incorporate this information into the institutional financial statements, representatives from the receivables area who are responsible for the processing of funding requests to sponsors, and representatives of the payroll/personnel and procurement teams, as these are major service areas to grant and contract activity. Finally, representatives of the areas that handle the "pre-award" grant and contract activity will be important, as well as faculty members who serve as principal investigators and therefore have frequent interaction with both the "pre-award" and "post-award" processes at the institution.
- Inventory/stores
Department administrators responsible for the ordering and receiving of equipment, hazardous materials, animals, and other major procurement items, as well as purchasing office representatives, accounts payable representatives, and those who handle any on-campus distribution and/or stores inventory should be included. Again, faculty who are responsible for sponsored research procurement may be helpful in evaluating these processes.
- Financial reporting and decision support
This team should include representatives from departments who are regular users of the institution's financial data, such as the fundraising office, the executive or governing board area, the budget office, and institutional research and planning, as well as mid- and upper-level managers who need access to institutional information in order to manage and revise institutional operations. The team will focus on ensuring that the data-mapping exercise has fully captured all appropriate levels of data to be stored and retrievable, as well as considering what reporting and access tools will make the data - and metadata - most useful to institutional decision-makers.
- Financial aid processing
This team should include representatives from the financial aid area, the student receivables function, the student loan function, and the federal funding collections function. In addition, representatives from admissions, the registrar's area, student employment, and perhaps some student advisory functions should be included, as well as some student consumers of the services being provided.
- Physical plant operations
If facilities operations are considered part of the financial systems of the institution, this team should involve supervisors and workers in the trades areas who would rely on a work-order system and an inventory management system, representatives of departments who are consumers of these services as residents in campus buildings, the facilities manager, and the business managers for the physical plant areas.
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