Before PSDS: The Early Days of Accounts Payable & Purchasing

Collaboration, problem-solving, and a lot of folding!

Contributed by Lisa Atkins & Shelly Winston Bowers

Before there was PSDS at UVAFinance, there was the merging of Accounts Payable with Purchasing. 

Under this conjoined department, buyers were also merged, and staff worked very closely with them to remedy invoices and purchase orders. For example, if they received an invoice that didn't match the purchase order, they would confer directly with a buyer at a nearby desk.

There were reports run for things like receiving holds, which detailed all the reasons for something to be held, and each staff member was responsible for looking at what they keyed into the system to see if it appeared on the hold report so they could reach out to the departments and request that they get the next actions moving forward. Sometimes, to get things off hold, receiving was done solely by the AP and Purchasing staff themselves.

The merged AP and Purchasing department also worked closely with the Bursar's office related to hold-for-pickup checks. Check processing took place a teeny tiny locked room with an automatic folding machine, that would fold the checks daily. The checks were then stored after being wrapped up with rubber bands and stuffed into huge plastic bins. Some days, thousands of these checks would be processed!

The joint department staff worked together in one big room where they were able to support one another and stay up to date on everything going on in AP and Purchasing. 

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Thanks to Shelly Winston-Bowers and Lisa Atkins for sharing these memories.  If you have some historical moments from UVAFinance/Carruthers history, feel free to share them with the Coms Team. 

Check out more Carruthers Hall history on the blog:  History of the Portrait/Chair, Mountains of Paper, Changes to Carruthers Hall Over the Years, Invoices, Phone Calls, and Filing, oh my!