Greetings All -

I wanted to take a moment to remind you of the importance of reconciling your GEMS transactions in a timely manner.

In the past few weeks, I have received notification of a significant number of expenses that have gone well over 90 days without being reconciled (i.e., allocated to the appropriate account to which they should be charged and submitted for approval.)

As you know, it is University policy that all GEMS transactions must be reconciled within 30 days of their occurrence. Once that fails to occur, the University sends you notifications at the 60, 90 and 110 day markers that your reconciliations are significantly overdue.

At the 110 day point, more drastic measures are taken: the University asks us, in Humanities Division administration, to work with you to get the transactions resolved immediately. It is crucial that if we are trying to contact you regarding overdue expenses, that you respond to us immediately. If we are not able to resolve the outstanding transactions for any reason (1) your card will be suspended; and (2) the total amount of the expense(s) will be added to your W-2 wages as taxable income.

If you ever need assistance in reconciling your expenses, you can contact our staff in Administrative Services. In addition to providing assistance over the phone, we are happy to have you drop by so that we can sit down with you to walk you through the process.

I will soon be contacting some of you on an individual basis about overdue expenses, but I encourage you to not wait for that before reconciling your expenses. Please take a moment now to log in to the GEMS system and make sure that all of your expenses are reconciled, assigned and submitted for approval.

It should be noted that the combined impact of all unreconciled transactions has a significant impact on Divisional operations. Most notably, because we don't know where the charges are going to ultimately end up, we do not have a clear picture of the financial status of the Division as a whole and, on an individual basis, we do not know the status of departmental budgets, research account balances, grants and fellowship spending, and so on.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or anyone in Administrative Services for assistance.

Thank you,

R Menon
Assistant Dean, Administration and Finance
Division of the Humanities