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It’s great to put faces with names for those of us who interact with people in Accounts Payable (AP), so this afternoon Lauren C., Prentice, Chris, Carol, Linda E. and Kristen went over to the UCC for a quick meet and greet. Angie Downing did the honors of introducing us to the people who process our invoices, credit card statements, credit memos, travel reimbursements and manage the payments and claiming of reimbursements for sales tax. Several members of AP complimented the library’s organized work flow of thorough documentation to their department.

We learned that much like us, the people in Accounts Payable are working on implementing more internal report functionality and are working on system changes and upgrades upgrades. They will be sending out a code manual to us all soon that will list account numbers. We also learned that much like us, they get a lot of the mail that is addressed to the University which lacks a specific recipient.

They also have to pay attention to state law changes and each year they watch to see if the state will decide to no longer reimburse sales tax to organizations such as educational institutions. If the state made such a decision, it would impact our budget, so we’re glad they are watching and would let us know if this happened.

We talked about how we’d love to have more automated exchange of info between us in the distant future, dependent on systems changes. We also learned that the big project coming up for AP is getting W-9 and W-8 BEN forms on file for every vendor so that they can send out 1099 forms to those vendors in the future. There is a change happening in the level of dollar amount that triggers the requirement, which will result in a shift from about 500 to 5000 in volume for the 1099 forms that AP will have to send out. AP will enlist our help on collecting W-9 and W-8 BEN forms when necessary (i.e. in the case of lack of responsiveness from a vendor), but they are planning to manage it as a project from their office for the most part. We are grateful for that.

ZSR and AP alike enjoyed the chance to meet each other face-to-face and to confirm that each had a good basic understanding of the needs and wishes of the other.