Motlow State Community College
Action Plan for Institutional Effectiveness
Planning Year: July 1, 2011 – June 30, 2012
Assessing Year: July 1, 2010 – June 30, 2011
Unit: Business Office
Related Strategic Goal:
4.2 Advance our college as a role model for sustainability.
Action Plan #: BOFF-02
Action Plan Title: Improving Efficiency in the Business Office
Desired Outcome: By December 2011, the Business Office will identify and implement two new best
practices for efficiency in support of sustainability to save time and money for the College.
Description of Action Plan and Related Activities: The Business Office will engage all Business Office
employees to come up with suggestions on streamlining current procedures and processes in an effort
to improve efficiency. In addition, we when attending conferences, training and other occasions when
interacting with other Higher Education institutions, we will look for best practices or other initiatives
that have shown improvement in efficiency and/or cost savings in time or money.
Team Members: Business Office employees
Timeline: Periodically review progress and assess progress in prior fiscal year each December.
Est. Cost: $500
Budgeted: Included in current budget
Evidence of Success: Each fiscal year, the Business Office will adopt two new best practices or improve
current processes for increased efficiency in support of sustainability. Processes must be documented
and be in use.
Complete the following when assessing a plan
Current Status: On Schedule
FALL 2011:
Describe Progress: For the period July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011, the goal was met. The Business Office
has adopted two new best practices for efficiency in support of sustainability. In January 2011, the
Business Office implemented Positive Pay.
Postive Pay is a best practice that helps reduce fraud in the vendor and student payment process.
Fraud prevention will help reduce the financial burden that may otherwise result from fraudulent
transactions being processed by the bank. Thus, it will save the College money. It should be noted
that we learned of this best practice from several sources and when checking out whether it would be
a wise use of College resources to implement, we found out that TBR had actually sustained a loss by
not having positive pay implemented. This was the extra motivation we needed to get the process
implemented in a timely fashion. The implementation was successful and the College is much more
protected from a possible fraud event now that we are using positive pay.
In June 2011, the Business Office began using a best practice used by other educational institutions
utilizing Sungard Banner to load adjustments for Motlow College into the accounting system
electronically instead of manually keypunching the transactions. Ironically, the College was already
using this process to a limited extent with a few of the TN Technology Centers we support. To
improve the efficiency of our processing, we determined we could utilize the best practice for Motlow
and the third Technology Center.
Loading data into the system electronically from a spreadsheet saves the College time and money. It
takes much less time to load a spreadsheet with 1000 lines than it does to manually keypunch that
same transaction. It also greatly reduces the errors made inherent with keypunching. When
keypunching a transaction that large, errors are often made but there is not a good way to always
determine how and where the errors are made. It is only much later when reconciling accounts that
the errors are caught. In the event that an error is not caught, it could result in a finding on our
annual audit. In addition to saving time and money and reducing errors, this process also improves
the quality of the data that is put into the system. By using a spreadsheet to enter the data, a unique
description can be used to identify each transaction. This has been very useful in reducing the time it
takes to reconcile accounts both on a monthly basis and on an annual basis. It would virtually be
impossible to keypunch a 1000 line journal entry and use a unique and detailed description for each
line as the time that it would take to do so would literally be hours.
Reaction from internal users have been very positive about the improved descriptions. Reaction from
the personnel involved with keypunching the transactions has also been positive.
Describe Needed Changes: The Business Office will continue to work to improve efficiency in support of
sustainability by adopting at least two new best practices each fiscal year or improving current
processes for increased efficiency in support of sustainability.
The staff is very excited to be engaged in finding ways to streamline processes and finding best
practices that other schools are using. We will continue to engage the staff which will help in getting
more ideas on what the best practices that already exists and are being used by other schools. We
will not limit the processes we improve or the best practices we implement to two per fiscal year but
instead will set that as a minimum number.
List of Supporting Documentation: Business Office IE Supporting Documentation 12-01-11
Date Last Updated: 12/1/11