Following the Money

By: Irene Tsikitas Lin

Our automated, digital world makes it easier than ever to set up recurring payments for the goods and services we use every day. But that “set it and forget it” style of expense management has a downside: If you aren’t following the money with a watchful eye, you may be missing out on opportunities for savings.

Enter the Procurement Impact Team in Accounts Payable & Procurement Services – Jen Britton, Allen Riddick, and Bo Solomon. By closely examining recurring spend at the University and working directly with departments to eliminate waste and switch to lower-cost alternatives, the team recovered approximately $362,000 in savings in fiscal year 2025. “Since fall 2024, the three of us have been working together in a more focused way to examine month-to-month spending on accounts and services,” said Britton. What they found is that a lot of the unnecessary or duplicative spend is occurring due to a breakdown of information-sharing, either about the services Drexel already provides, or about longstanding contract or service arrangements that may no longer be needed.

The team acknowledges how easy it is to lose sight of auto payments and renewals when staff are feeling overloaded, or when there is turnover in a department. “We were able to get a lot of impact by having a dedicated team reach out directly to P-Cardholders and remind them to examine their monthly expenditures more closely,” says Riddick.

“People have been really receptive to this initiative,” adds Solomon. “We don’t want to police anyone’s spending. We just want to help folks identify where there may be spending they can avoid, and connect them with resources they might not have known about.”

Printers & Phones

The Procurement Impact Team started in fall 2024 by looking at the University’s spend on Canon printer/copier services, where they found a significant opportunity to scale back and renegotiate leases for a better deal. “As devices came to the end of their lease period, we helped departments get new, lower cost devices that still met their needs. That work has saved the University $254,000 since we started that project,” says Britton. The team will soon start a second round of renegotiations on devices that are coming to the end of their old lease terms.

They also dug into Drexel’s spending on mobile phone accounts with AT&T, where they found some departments were still unknowingly paying for accounts that weren’t being used. “We reduced our bill with AT&T by about $3,500 per month just by cancelling accounts that nobody was using,” says Britton. The team is continuing to review phone records every couple of months to look for inactive accounts.

Digital Services

In fall 2025, the Office of Program Management and Organizational Effectiveness approached the Procurement Impact Team with an idea: Why not look into digital memberships and subscriptions? The team started by examining the entire P-Card spend for FY25 to look for patterns, where they found moderate levels of unnecessary spending on duplicative digital services. For example, Drexel has an institutional license that gives benefits-eligible Drexel employees free access to Adobe Creative Cloud products for photo editing, graphic design, stock photography, and more. Yet a number of P-Card users were paying for monthly subscriptions to either Adobe or a similar service, not realizing they could get it for free.

“We connected with IT for guidance and support and have redirected department spend on services like Adobe, Canva, Dropbox, stock photography, and newspapers and periodicals,” says Britton. “In each of these categories, Drexel already provides resources that don’t burn up departments’ and offices’ budgets.”

Sustaining the Momentum

To ensure the early success of this initiative continues well into the future, the Procurement Impact Team is now proactively monitoring P-Card spend on a monthly basis and communicating directly and regularly with P-Cardholders, who are on the frontlines of this effort to root out unnecessary or duplicative spending. The team is also investigating additional opportunities for big impact, such as reducing the $80,000 a year spent on departmental Mailchimp subscriptions.

So what can you do to support this initiative?

“We want everybody at Drexel who has spending and purchasing privileges to prioritize resource stewardship,” says Britton. That means asking questions and consulting with resources like the Sourcing team in Accounts Payable & Procurement Services, as well as the members of the Procurement Impact Team, before approving new expenditures. It means periodically reviewing mobile phone accounts, your usage of copiers and printers, and other common recurring expense areas to identify potential savings opportunities. And it means taking advantage of in-house resources like the Drexel Buy-Nothing Depot and Equipment Surplus program to help support Drexel’s financial resilience and sustainability.