With 16 Nobel Prizes and a reputation for playing a leading role in academic research and education, Leiden University has very high standards to uphold.
Monetary gifts and payments are often given in exchange for delivering external services and activities, such as guest lectures or training courses, and for refunding members of staff or students. The university needed to modernise the way it provided these cash, gift cards and debit card payments to staff, students and its large quantities of visiting third parties. Payments had to be accurately documented and fiscally managed so they could ensure compliance with the latest tax regulations.
Peter Magielse, SAP Manager, Leiden University says, “There was a considerable amount of manual admin and paper trails because we were physically distributing cash payments from the desk.”
Tighter financial controls and transparency would involve digitalising request-to-pay processes. For example, its current process did not allow the university to easily link payments to third parties with IB47 declarations or record data that needed to be fed through to the tax authorities. Self-service web-based applications would make it much quicker and easier to manage payments, provide automated checks, dramatically reducing paperwork and labour-intensive administration.
“One of the principles at the university was to minimise cash payments. We wanted to move to becoming a cashless university campus,” Peter explains.
