Original article published on Linkedin by Dustin Lanier, CPPO
We had a great discussion on "Flipping the Financial Year - In Style" with perspectives from state, local and higher education procurement practitioners, and it's available in on-demand audio! Below are some of the discussion highlights:
- "We start about March, giving what the deadlines will be to meet the end of the year."
- "I like to look at our fiscal year as moving out of the house - we move out of the house so we can move into a new space."
- "Have clear, transparent, and well-communicated schedules for how the fiscal year-end will take place."
- "Because we are so busy, we have dedicated people two for fiscal year cleanups under 250k and one under 1 million, and that's all they do in this season."
- "We have an open/close calendar online and give weekly updates to know about the queue and their deadlines."
- "We switch over our training to be focused on open/close issues to really up our game during that phase."
- "We have a thirty-day extension process, so if people are getting to the end of the year but they haven't gotten the paperwork in, they can do a virtual 30-day extension to protect all parties."
- "End of year is a great opportunity to stress test some of your core processes."
- "We don't want to spend the money just to say we spent it and got a discount if we're not going to be actually utilizing the product in a reasonable timeframe."
- "You don't want any question as to the last-minute purchases squeezing their way through and not being vetted as you otherwise would just because we feel the pressure to get it processed."
- "We actually close out the fiscal year about 45 days after it ends, so we shut down the system after we give the departments an opportunity to enter their new requisitions and make those beginning of fiscal year purchases."
- "We have two fiscal years running simultaneously, and then our year closes at the end of August, and then we clean up after that for the financial reports."
- "We've made a mandatory training about 30 days before the end of the fiscal year for individuals with a choice of fiscal years to enter on how to properly record and split the money."
- "There's an additional accounting requirement - GASB 96 - for subscription-based IT services and software subscriptions. Licensing expenses would be separated from the subscription-based costs and procurement should help make that easy to do."
Go listen to the audio today in our podcast series "Public Procurement Change Agents" wherever you get your podcasts!
