Rates & Review
The Rates & Review Team (R&R) performs functions of oversight, process and business improvement, and compliance on a division-wide basis. The role of the R&R Team is largely behind the scenes and unseen but is absolutely essential if ALVSCE is to deliver on its omnipresent responsibility of public stewardship and accountability. The team is primarily focused on two important roles:
- Unit Business Reviews: determine best practice recommendations for leverage across the Division, ensure compliance, identify need gaps and provide training, and recommend operational, business, and efficiency improvements to units. Reviews are based on a matrix of potential risk. Units that have undergone review have realized:
- thousands of dollars in savings that can be put back into the mission;
- improved staff training;
- tightened operations to ensure compliance with ABOR, UA, and ALVSCE policies;
- and unit leadership has received unbiased and professional guidance on dealing with business challenges.
- Rate Studies: supports units in developing internal and external cost-based rate studies so that unit leadership can appropriately set pricing for services. The goal is full-cost recovery, but at a minimum, rate studies provide unit leadership an accounting of the amount of institutional subsidy that goes into sales and service activities to make improved investment and compliance decisions.
Team members have substantial business operational knowledge and are offered as a service to the Division to ensure resources are invested with the aim of driving mission attainment.
The Financial Services Office’s Rate Studies Handbook was designed to serve as a reference guide and contains best practices for service centers. It is an additional, in-depth resource for interpreting and applying both Federal Guidance and Policy 18.10: Service Centers. Adherence to the principles within the Rate Studies Handbook constitutes a good faith effort to comply with federal guidance and relevant University of Arizona policies.