What's new with the university PCard program

We’ve heard your feedback! The Yale University Purchasing Card Program (PCard) team has taken proactive steps to align the PCard to usage needs and behaviors. Since the program’s inception, PCard limits have not changed to keep up with rising inflation and technology. Likewise, the program’s structure had not evolved to meet the community’s growing demands. After careful analysis and benchmarking against other higher education institutions, we approved several initiatives to improve the user experience and add efficiencies. These PCard projects and the solid partnership with our card provider have reduced cardholder declines, enhanced new cardholder training, lowered the number of cards suspended, simplified the exception process, removed outdated cards, and added new publishing fee limits. 

In addition to improving user experience, adherence to policies and procedures was also a priority for these projects. An overall assessment was performed to determine the initial areas of focus to provide the most impact. Engaging the business community was vital to the university’s mission and the project’s success. The project teams worked closely with the lead administrators, operations managers, and the finance Senior Leadership Team. The project team thanks these individuals who devoted their time to providing input, guidance, and invaluable feedback to enhance the PCard program.  

The following are some of the latest accomplishments from the collaboration and efforts of several projects and individuals working on the PCard program: 

•  Training for new PCard holders: Working with the Finance Training and Development team, a new interactive training module was created and is now accessible through Workday Learning. This training will continue to evolve and may be expanded to include existing cardholder refresher training.
• Increased PCard limits: Proactive steps were taken to address purchasing card (PCard) limit issues. Careful analysis was performed to determine what the new limits should be, and approval the Senior Leadership Team provided approval to automatically and seamlessly increase PCard spending limits with minimal disruption to university business. In alignment with the OneFinance North Star, increasing PCard limits will make life easier by reducing the need for temporary and permanent limit exception requests and decreasing the number of point-of-sale (transaction) declines. These increases align with current PCard spending behavior and changing trends in cardholder usage and account for rising inflation.
• Added separate publishing fee limits: Cardholders can now request a separate limit for publication and publishing fee type purchases.   
• PCard Exceptions: In alignment with our OneFinance North Star, the new automated form simplifies the request process by eliminating the manual PDF form and automating the routing of PCard Exception requests. The online form saves considerable time printing/scanning, physically obtaining signatures, and manually transmitting the form through email. As an additional enhancement, the PCard department will now have more visibility into the status of the form and will facilitate the collection of data to be evaluated for future process improvements.
• Auto suspension notices: To encourage the timely submission of expense reports, we’ve clarified the process around actions needed, developed notification content, and determined the frequency of notifications. This collaborative effort with Finance Systems Support and Change Management resulted in reminders, warnings, and suspension notices to PCard holders who have unprocessed expense transactions. The unprocessed transactions violate Policy 3215 Yale Purchasing Card and the Yale University Purchasing Cardholder Agreement. This increased transparency, by alerting lead administrators and business managers of delinquent cardholders, has resulted in fewer and fewer suspensions each week since launch.

The PCard program, part of Procurement Operations, will continuously look for ways to improve cardholder experience by working with JP Morgan, Finance departments and most importantly the Yale community.