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Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.

So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.

My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.

by doctorpangloss4 minutes ago|

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do you know anyone closely enough to ask and get an honest answer? in my experience, academics say this is all administrative bloat that has been increasing forever.

by hamdingers2 hours ago|

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The level of trust didn't change at all, Joann must have read every single receipt as she filled out the forms. A fraudulent or out-of-policy expense would've been noticed either way.

by jonahx2 hours ago|

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High-trust doesn't mean absolute trust. Hand me a pile of receipts and I'll figure it out (probably with leeway in your favor) is much higher trust than uploading receipt, categorizing, adding explanations for exceptions, etc. One feels reasonable and still dignified. The other feels adversarial and paternalistic.

by thwarted2 hours ago|

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Joanne probably had to field some "sorry, this can't be expensed" situations, and/or those were reduced because people knew another human was doing the work and they'd get called out, trying to game/abuse the system was less or just naturally discouraged. That was high trust, by both the employee and by Joanne.

With the employees needing to use Concur directly, there's a tendency, since there's a diversity in how each employee will handle the specifics, to try to "save money" by denying reimbursements for any random violation, making sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed. The automated system itself encourages this because it's so low effort to deny and send the expense form back, potentially wearing down the employe that they just give up. Joanne could avoid all that at scale because there was little/no diversity in how expenses were handled. If an i needed to be dotted, she could handle it, and she knew all the i's that needed to be dotted across all expense reports.

I currently have someone to handle my expense reports who sits in front of Concur for me! And that person routinely asks me for specific detail without me having to mess with Concur at all, things like "who was at this dinner you gave me a receipt for" or "I can't find the receipt for this company card charge".

by jimnotgym59 minutes ago|

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I work at an organization that uses concur. My team work at the other end of the process. They take Concur outputs and pay the claimants back. We find that somehow makes us the support department, adding users, training them, and worse still teaching them how to get around rejections. It is a bit less work for us than the paper forms I started my career with. It does rather push the overhead of claiming the expense onto the claimers though, many of which tend to be those whose time is most expensive. I'm not sure it works out.

by seb12042 hours ago|

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This, the person nitpicking the Concur entries might as well have done Joanne's job and achieve two things at once. Compliance to concur and the regulatory compliance built into the concur process and not wasting everyone's time doing concur

by joe_the_user1 hours ago|

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I've seen adversarial approaches in small companies or even an individual boss and I've seen cooperative approaches in moderately large organizations.

The shift toward an adversarial approach in just about any organization is noticeable, in fact, in the US in the last 10-15 years but the US hasn't grown in size that much, large scale organizations existed much earlier.