The Service Excellence Program is helping York implement a vision of service excellence across the University, by identifying, facilitating, and implementing operational improvements and service delivery improvement initiatives across all non-academic services. This is a recent successful initiative.
New Approach Significantly Reduces Expense Claims Processing Time
The Finance Department supported by the Service Excellence Program recently conducted a review of current practices for processing expense claims. As a result of that review, a new approach has been introduced that focuses compliance review resources on the highest risk claims, reducing processing time for most expense claims.
What’s new?
Community members will benefit from two new changes that will help reduce the processing time for expense claims:
- A new threshold for central finance review has been introduced.
- The secondary compliance review on research expense claims greater than $10K has been removed.
| Change | Benefits to York community |
|---|---|
| Introduction of a $1000 threshold for full review by central finance for expense claims (introduced Sep. 01, 2020). | The processing time for claims up to $1000, will be reduced by an average of six (6) days. |
| Removal of the secondary compliance review for research expense claims greater than $10,000 in value (introduced Dec. 02, 2020). | The processing time for claims greater than $10,000, will be reduced by an average of two (2) days. |
Why the change?
Many Universities in Canada and internationally take a risk-based approach to expense claim compliance reviews. After reviewing York’s current practices, the Finance department determined that this approach would work well for York, given that:
- Low value claims (<$1,000) are of low risk to the University and make up 80% of total claims but only 21% of total value.
- Primary review of research claims are both thorough and highly effective, with a less than 3% non-compliance identified when they reach the secondary review.
Additional Information
For information on previous expense reimbursement changes, click here. For information on the new expense claim $1,000 threshold, click here.
For more information or general enquiries, contact the Office of the Comptroller at (416) 736-5143.