Procurement and Payment Services (PPS), in partnership with Enterprise Business IT Solutions (eBITS), has been diligently working to identify options for assisting the university in tracking and monitoring payments associated with business contracts as part of an audit driven process improvement. Goals of these efforts include:
- Establishing a common practice to ensure payments under a business contract do not exceed approved dollar limits
- Provide CSUs and processing offices with a standardized process to associate payments with contracts.
After reviewing existing processes and functionality, which included great feedback from many Colleges, Schools, and Units (CSUs), the team has focused their efforts on implementing process changes in *DEFINE, including adding a new field to VP2 and VPE documents. The proposed new field will require document creators to indicate whether a payment is related to a contract. Contract payments will require entry of the associated contract number in a standardized location on each payment transaction. Associating payment transactions with contract numbers will enable CSUs and processing offices to use this information to create reports and reconcile contract spending more consistently and efficiently. This functionality will also help to facilitate the development of future process enhancements.
Implementation of the new functionality is scheduled to occur in June 2022. Please be mindful of these upcoming changes and look forward to additional communications regarding procedural details and aids for document creators.
As we move forward, please direct any questions regarding the new contract tracking processes to Procurement and Payment Services at purchasing@austin.utexas.edu.