Campus purchasing

How the work is organized

Preserve the requesting campus when a group procurement team handles the supplier relationship. Where separate legal entities share a purchase, define the allocation and intercompany treatment with finance. Attach evidence such as a quotation or specification to the request and retain changes made after review. If the value changes beyond the agreed tolerance, send the revised commitment back for approval.

• Keep entity scope. A user from one campus cannot review another entity’s restricted requests merely because they share a supplier.
• Reapprove material changes. A changed purpose, value or budget owner returns the request to review.
• Distinguish approval from payment. The accounting source retains the invoice, receipt and payment evidence separately.

What to agree during setup

Agree request categories, campus cost centers and approval thresholds. Use actual procurement examples that include a rejected request, an amended quotation and a shared group purchase. Decide which procurement or accounting system remains authoritative for supplier orders and receipts. The integration must return a source reference that staff can use during reconciliation.

Check the handoff on an actual case

A department submits a request for laboratory equipment and receives approval against a quotation. The supplier later changes the price or substitutes a different specification. Keep the original request and approval evidence visible while the changed commitment is reviewed. An unchanged request number should not make the earlier authorization appear to cover a materially different purchase.

If another campus contributes to the purchase, finance needs to know which department benefits and which legal entity is responsible for the supplier. That allocation should remain attached to the expenditure documents. A group-level report can then explain the cost without confusing the paying entity with the location using the equipment.

During the pilot, follow the request through the designated purchasing system and back to its invoice reference. Check that an approval, supplier order, accepted receipt and payment are represented by the appropriate evidence. The request itself should never be presented as proof that the equipment arrived or the supplier was paid.

Follow the work through

Approved requests can be handed to the institution’s purchasing system. Match the returned commitment and invoice references before reporting departmental spending as actual expenditure.

• Application to enrollment: Move an application through a recorded admission decision into the correct academic period.
• Fee billing to reconciliation: Issue approved charges, allocate confirmed receipts and investigate the remaining balance.

Review the implementation plan and the data model before preparing your import files.