Ongoing Financial Affairs Projects

We work with cross-functional teams to improve financial processes and resources.

Annual Financial Certification - SAHARA

The Financial Affairs annual financial certification project will create a more streamlined approach to the annual department manager financial certification. The financial certification process will be performed via the SAHARA application in PeopleSoft.

SAHARA provides a transparent, intuitive, and global view of manager cost centers and projects and their reconciliation status. This project extends these attributes to the required annual financial certification process.

Timeline: June 2021 through September 2021

Website Upgrade

Financial Affairs website project is a modernization upgrade and redesign for Financial Affairs’ websites including all subordinate departments. Our foremost focus for the redesign was to create a positive user experience. We conducted a focus group to hear about users' experiences, explored best practices in web redesign best practices and SEO, which directed us to develop a site plan our users could easily navigate to find the most relevant and commonly used information.  

Timeline: August 2020 through April 2021

PaymentWorks

Financial Affairs’ PaymentWorks project seeks to implement a vendor/supplier onboarding application tool that integrates with UTShare PeopleSoft.

The new onboarding application allows suppliers to submit their registrations, and future updates, electronically. The application collects compliance related information and verifies supplier’s credentials and identities.

Timeline:  October 2020 through March 2021 

GRA/GTA Conversion to Contract Pay

GRA/GTA conversion to contract pay seeks to transition from salary to contract pay for Graduate Research Assistants (GRA) and Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA) employees. The contract payment method allows consistent month-to-month payments for GRAs and GTAs, with no fluctuations other than a prorated payment for contracts beginning or ending mid-month.

Timeline: October 2020 through August 2021

Pilot group

• December 2020
  Begin hiring for pilot GRA and GTA for spring 2021 semester, effective 1/16/2021
• January through May 2021
  GRA and GTA pilot employees under contract pay
• April 2021
  Transition all GRA and GTAs campus-wide for summer 2021 contracts, effective 6/1/2021
• June through August 2021
  All GRA and GTA under contract pay

Supply Chain Task Force

Supply Chain project seeks to maximize university resources through strategic sourcing and streamlining business processes.

Timeline:  December 2020 through 2021

Goals:

• Simplify processes and reduce paper processing
• Customer service agreements and training plan
• Tools for departmental purchasers/users
• Metrics to measure and report for each Supply Chain office
• Begin strategic sourcing for common commodities
• Develop tools to track and reduce inefficiencies caused by departmental processing errors
• Compliance risk assessment and risk tolerance
• Implement outreach strategy that reaches all departments on a rotating basis
• Training analysis