Higher education travel and expense is its own discipline. It should be treated like one.
Colleges, universities, community colleges and academic medical centers. That's the whole client list, on purpose.
Four things a corporate T&E consultant will learn on your dime.
Sponsored research and grant compliance
A trip charged to a federal award has rules a corporate program never sees: allowability, allocability, Fly America, per diem versus actual, and an auditor who will ask about all of it three years later. The program has to enforce those rules at the point of expense, not at the point of audit.
Decentralized departments with real autonomy
Chemistry doesn't book travel the way athletics does, and neither of them books it the way the medical school does. A program that treats the campus as one company gets worked around by everyone. The configuration has to hold the line on policy while leaving room for how each unit actually operates.
Faculty travel
Conferences booked eleven months out. Sabbaticals. Field work with no receipts. A visiting scholar who isn't an employee. Faculty travel refuses to behave like corporate travel, and a program that assumes it will produces the shoebox of receipts and the dean who books outside the tool.
Governance
The right answer still has to survive the faculty senate, the deans' council, procurement, internal audit and the CFO, in some order, before it becomes the real answer. Knowing how to get a policy through that process is as much of the job as knowing what the policy should say.
What this looks like on your campus.
- Research universitiesYou have volume, complexity and an audit exposure to match. Sponsored research is the center of the problem. The work is usually a health check of a mature program, an audit rule redesign, or a reimplementation on a platform you've outgrown.
- Regional public universitiesYou have most of the complexity of a flagship with a fraction of the finance staff. The program was probably configured by a vendor years ago and nobody has had time to revisit it. The work is usually an optimization that gives you a program your two-person AP team can run.
- Community collegesTravel is a small line and a large headache. Board policy, state rules and a finance office that does everything. You've assumed consulting help is priced for someone else. It isn't. The work is usually a policy rewrite plus a right-sized platform setup, done quickly.
- Private collegesLean staff, close relationships with faculty, and a culture where policy is enforced by conversation rather than by system. The work is usually building the system so the conversations can stop.
- Academic medical centersClinical, research and academic travel in one program, with physician travelers, industry-sponsored travel and disclosure requirements on top of everything a university faces. The work is usually a compliance framework and the configuration to enforce it.
The smaller the finance office, the more this was designed for you.
The large firms staff higher education T&E work with the same pyramid and the same rates they use for an institution with deep pockets, which means the institutions with the most to gain from a working program are the ones least able to buy one. Clay Downs was founded to fix that. A single senior consultant, engagements scoped to the problem, and a price that assumes you have a budget committee.
If you've been putting this off because you assumed you couldn't afford it, start with a call. The first conversation is free and the answer might be smaller than you think.