UC Santa Cruz Business and Administrative Services
UC Santa Cruz Business and Administrative Services – Customized Third-Party Auditing Tool
This was the first year that the UC Santa Cruz Business and Administrative Services (BAS) unit participated in the Corporate Sponsored Senior Projects Program (CSSPP) at Baskin Engineering. The Financial Affairs unit, housed under BAS, sought out the innovation of Baskin Engineering’s CSSPP students to help with an important objective: the development and implementation of a customized third-party auditing tool (TPAT) for UCSC procurement cards (pro-cards) that would enable insight into the campus-wide program necessary to expand on its success.
Through the implementation of the customized TPAT, staff will be able to conduct automated, in-depth analysis of pro-card transactional data, utilizing filters and rules aligned with UCSC policies, and easily generate a variety of reports. The current pro-card auditing process requires a manual review of individual transactions, which is very time consuming and enables limited data analysis.
Students Sterling Nicholson, Sheng Cheng, Veshant Chettiar, and Harmeet Sohal set out to address these challenges by creating a platform that is intuitive, adaptable, and efficient. Although sponsors Biju Kamaleswaran, BAS interim vice chancellor; Ed Moran, director of accounting services; and Marcia Bock, program policy analyst, worked toward having the auditing tool ready for the students to work with at the start of the project, the tool was unfortunately not available until the second quarter of the two-quarter senior project.
“The students took the initiative to move the project forward without access to the tool, highlighting from the beginning their ability to be self-sufficient and extremely innovative,” Bock said.
The BAS student team was given two years worth of historical pro-card transactional data to analyze against current UCSC pro-card policies for insight on their effectiveness and potential adjustments to better serve the pro-card program. With this information, they developed a responsive web-based application.
Nicholson explained that with the team’s combined expertise in AI, web design and development, programming, and making and running queries, they were able to efficiently create the web tool and add various filters to aid in analyzing, uploading, and exporting data, and visualizing data to report spending trends and locate which areas of the data need to be flagged for further review.
Once the team received access to the TPAT, they transferred the data they worked on from the web application and created rules and filters specific to UCSC’s policies and needs. The student implementation of this new tool enables users to export data files, run filters, analyze policies, add customization, and visualize data in a more tangible way.
“This project had been on our radar for a while, but we just didn’t have the dedicated resources to move it forward,” Kamaleswaran said. “Teaming up with CSSPP students who brought their skills, enthusiasm, and creativity, we were able to move this project forward and we now have a working solution. As much as the students learned from their experience, we also made progress and gained from their efforts.”
After the student team finishes presentations to various campus leadership groups, they will train Financial Affairs staff so they are ready to use this tool once official approval is given.
When asked what advice would you give to future CSSPP students, Nicholson touched on two main points, “Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification and make sure your team has a solid foundation of communication. Those two things are going to set you and your team up for success throughout the two-quarter project.”