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Cooperative Extension Service
Departments
Financial Services
Why Do It This Way?I'm sure, like most of us, you often wonder why the Financial Services office makes up
all of those ridiculous rules to follow. Well, for the most part, those
ridiculous rules originate outside our organization. Here are a few examples:
If two people are traveling together, instead of each person paying his
or her share of a meal why can't one of them pay the entire bill on a credit
card and submit that for reimbursement? That is specifically restricted in
the state accounting manual in Section II -11.3 "One State employee may
not include in his travel expense statement the expenses of another State
employee traveling in his company."
The local office supply store has post-it notes at a better price than we
can get through the online supplies ordering system. Why can't we buy them
there? The state procurement office negotiates with vendors to get the best
prices possible for state agencies and institutions. The only way to get
vendors to sell at those discounted prices is to give them an exclusive
contract which prohibits us from buying the contracted items from any other
vendor. We risk violating those contracts if we buy those items from
non-contract vendors. Of course, retailers have sales and most of them have
loss leaders (did you know most office supply stores actually lose money on
paper clips?) to get you in the door so you can occasionally find items
cheaper than what we get on contract. However, if you compare the small
savings you realize on that single item with the amount we are able to save
over a full year on the many items included in our purchasing contracts
there really is no comparison.
Those are just a few of the many regulations we live by. Of course, we always
have the choice of not following all of these external rules. We know how to run
this organization, don't we? We certainly have the expertise to establish our
own policies and regulations. So, we should just do it our way, right? Well,
there is the small matter of our funding that stands in the way of making that
move. It seems that each of our funding sources has a number of regulations that
dictate the way we spend the money we receive from them. Our options are simple:
we can live by the rules we are given or we can find a new source of revenue.
Now for those ridiculous rules we set. If there are policies set internally
that you would like to see changed, let's review them and decide whether it can
happen. "It's always been done that way" is not a valid reason for
keeping a policy. Maybe it has always been done wrong or the reason for doing it
that way changed ten years ago. How do we determine, then, whether a policy is
set internally or based on external regulations? You ask, of course. If there is
a policy that doesn't make sense to you, contact the
Financial Services and let us know about it. We can determine the source of the
policy and decide from there how to proceed.
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