Texas A&M ‘See it all’ by centralizing spend data. Sees major process and compliance improvements

Business Challenge

Texas A&M University is a public university situated in College Station, Texas. The university's financial auditing team encountered challenges due to high transactional volumes and lengthy audit processes. They were mainly focused on manual, sample-based expense report auditing and daily tasks, rather than prioritizing the monitoring of high-risk items and strategic issues.

Because Texas A&M did not have an AI-based auditing system in place, they were unable to monitor trends or track behavior, and therefore could not influence change in their expense management process. Additionally, one team of auditors was responsible for reviewing T&E, while outside auditors were tasked with reviewing payment cards (P-cards).

Given the limited resources and transactions across multiple platforms, the Texas A&M team needed new technology to centralize and view all their spend data in one place, to prevent further cash leakage

Solution

After researching the market for risk tools, the Texas A&M Division of Finance and Operations chose Oversight because of its pre-payment and post-payment capabilities and the ability to monitor 100% of transactions right away.

Having all this data centralized, enabled the audit team to start trend analysis which gave them insight into reoccurring issues. With this new insight into employee spend, the team is now able to communicate effectively with employees to influence behavior.

Results

By incorporating Oversight’s Payables Monitoring, Texas A&M can monitor 100% of its payable transactions and with Oversight’s Travel & Expense Monitoring, it has insight into its P-card, travel, and out-of-pocket expenses. Additionally, the audit team is able to recover and prevent duplicate payments from across all payment platforms.

“We didn’t think we had that big of a problem, but it was bigger than we knew”, said Clint Merritt, Executive Director, Financial Management Operations. “With Oversight, we can identify common policy violations and can track violations by employee.”

With Oversight, the audit team has identified $460,000 in erroneous T&E spend and was able to avoid a double payment of $100,000. More than $5M in confirmed P-card issues were identified, and $1.5 million in non-compliant AP exceptions were flagged as of year-end 2021.

Benefits

“With Oversight’s communication tracking capabilities between the auditor and employee, we can focus training on common issues to increase compliance and, when necessary, identify when disciplinary action is needed,” said Clint.

With the audit team’s new focus only on the riskiest transactions, they have a greater sense of the overall impact and value they bring to the University.