Team Information

Sridevi Bankupalli, Sridevi.bankupalli@cu.edu, Assistant Director of Finance System Development
Milap Sharma, Milap.sharma@cu.edu, Assistant VP of IT Service Delivery

Who

Linda Warren (UIS)
Ryan Day(UIS)
Koffi Gnatsidji (AMC)
Sonya Lee (CU Boulder)
Melinda Hamilton (UCCS)

What

The Billing Automation initiative rolled out a series of process improvements across the Grants billing teams in all CU campuses.

Prior to Billing automation, campuses billers parsed large PDF invoice files generated from Peoplesoft, used PDF editing features to break up the file into specific invoices, individual signed and e-mailed each invoice manually in Outlook using contact information stored in shadow systems. Detailed invoicing required further manual reports to be generated and attached to the email. Billing automation created custom enhancements to Peoplesoft that allows Billers to generate individual invoices at the requested level of detail, electronically sign them, and directly email the invoice PDF from PeopleSoft to a designated sponsor contact. The stored Invoice PDFs also be shared with campus departmental users. This improved process has resulted in tremendous time savings for billing teams, better cash flow via timely invoicing, and better customer service via the ability to share files to campus departments.

Why

Prior to Billing Automation, campuses were considering adding headcount to keep up with increased billing activity due to CU’s research growth. Making our systems more efficient and automating manual processes allows Sponsored Project billing teams to do more with their limited resources and focus on higher value tasks.
Timely invoicing is key to ensuring prompt payment from sponsors. Via Billing Automation improvements, the time taken to produce individual invoices is reduced. This results in fewer delays in invoicing and helps to maintain cash flow. Creating a repository of invoices allows easier sharing of information across central and departmental users.

When

Billing Automation initiative started in May 2019, was conducted in a series of 3 phases and wrapped up in September 2020.The functionality rolled out in Phases 1 & 2 enabled the campus billers to store signature images in PeopleSoft,       electronically sign individual invoices and email invoices to sponsors directly from PeopleSoft. The initial population was referred to as a Pilot and was limited to sponsors who do not require detail invoicing. Phase 3 added the Invoice Detail       Report for detailed invoicing. This enabled the campuses to expand the rollout to the maximum number of sponsors who accept email delivered invoices.