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I’ve been in my current role just over a year and it is the second one where we had a bit of process change around money. In my previous role, the CFO died about 5 months after I started and we found that knowledge of some of the library’s processes died with him. When our finance person moved to a different college at the university last year, it was another opportunity to take a look at how to manage our money.
I am confident that budgeting is one of those skills that, even if you are exposed to it in library school, you really only learn once you’re on the job. Budgeting is such a big topic and I think it overshadows the processes that surround it, particularly the spending of the budgeted money. This part of the financial process is much more complicated, suffused as it is with internal financial controls, as well as ensuring that services and acquisitions the library acquires are paid for.
Who Manages Payables
When our finance person left, I discussed with my Dean some options around replacing the role and, in the end, decided to eliminate it. In actual fact, it was a half time role for the law library; it had been a full-time role for a department that had contained the library and the IT department. When these teams split, this role went with the library but did payables for both units. While I didn’t know the scope of the IT part of the role, I knew the law library part of the role was not substantial enough to warrant a full-time person.
In addition, after going the changes in my previous role, which involved absorbing a lot of the financial processes on a temporary basis, I was confident about this approach a second time. In that case, I had maintained the idea of possibly replacing the person although, in the end, it became simpler to just manage the finance processes myself. The change we made was to hire an accounting service to maintain our books at arms-length, and we licensed an accounts payable system (Bill.com) to make our bill paying more efficient and transparent.
My current role didn’t require or allow for those sorts of modifications. We have a terribly antiquated payables and purchasing process. Like the public law library, the public university law school library has a public funds responsibility. So it amazed me that the payable system was built on top of the student grading system, then supplemented with an appropriation add-on. It is labrynthine and complicated and surely has created full employment for dozens of people to manage that complexity. I find it deeply frustrating.
I would be less jaded I suppose if I thought the complexity led to better outcomes. But they don’t. It lacks sufficient internal controls (I have been able to approve contracts that I have put into the system, for example, due to a misconfiguration) and separates the purchaser from the payment. Invoices are mailed to the Purchasing department without me ever seeing them and confirming the payment is true and correct. Imagine that a book publisher can just email invoices to Purchasing, who debits your account, without any determination that the book has arrived?
Even with all of that, though, a typical law library is not a hugely complicated financial operation. I don’t recall how many invoices we processed at the public law library but we only paid bills every 2 weeks and I would think we only paid 10 or 20 bills per cycle. There were probably 250 payment events a year.
This was top of mind then when our finance person left. We make even fewer purchases in my current law library, probably 120 or so a year. That includes the monthly payments to RELX and Thomson Reuters for their products. Since I’m an internal unit and not standalone, all of the personnel costs are handled elsewhere. I am solely focused on operational expenses.
I am now a firm believer in the law library director being as far into the payables process as possible. There are limits, for both reasons of internal controls and mere distribution of responsibility. It makes sense for someone in technical services (acquisitions) to handle this part of the process. But in a small law library—and there are only 10 of us—it is a great way to watch the life-blood of the organization move. I have learned a lot about parts of our operations merely by seeing who we are paying for what.
Unfortunately, our current system means that I spend hours a week managing expenses. The invoice process means that I almost never know if something has been paid or, if it has been approved, when it will be disbursed. I expect our vendors find this frustrating.
Present Imperfect Legal Publishers
This is compounded by the automated systems breaking down. We had one vendor who had successfully been able to email invoices. Then they couldn’t but wanted to be paid. When I send in the invoices (this is still a current issue), our Purchasing team declines them, saying that the vendor has to send the invoice.
I have had to start to build my own offline, spreadsheet-based processes to try to wrangle all of this. I’m not thrilled about it but it is mostly a supplement to the sharing of our financials with staff. I’ve included them in the development of the budget and, once it was completed, placed the budget and our actual expenses in a regularly updated spreadsheet out on our shared network drive. As new invoices come in, I add them to this spreadsheet and note when I forward them to purchasing. When I discover invoices that went to Purchasing first, I incorporate them as well. For the largest licenses where we pay in bulk—in particular the Thomson Reuters LMA and our RELX Matthew Bender print—I have pre-populated the spreadsheet to help me catch when the invoices are expected.
This is in part because the legal publishers seem to be particularly awful at invoicing. I had Thomson Reuters sending me invoices on an account for which I could find no information. It had not been added to the law library’s “My Account” interface so it was completely invisible to me. This may be unique to me, but I don’t pay invoices when I don’t know what they’re for. They have fixed this but for the last two months, the Thomson Reuters My Account system generates invoices on the first of the month but will not release them. So I spent time checking to see when these invoices, now due, would be released for payment: they are visible in the list of invoices but throw an error on attempting to access. I’ve decided to just calendar a followup 5 days into the month. Why a company as big as Thomson Reuters can’t get invoicing down is beyond me, especially when they wipe 15% of my Net 30 off the calendar.
What about email, you might ask? No joy. I have not had any luck with regular emailing of these invoices. Don’t even get me started on RELX’s “Print and CD Center”. Hey, Lexis, the 1990s called and they want their website back.
Their antiquated and unreliable systems are one of the factors as I start to look at our bulk purchasing agreements. While there are good reasons to both keep and drop a library maintenance agreement (LMA), one of the concerns I have is the subsequent invoice burden that would result from going à la carte for book purchases. The “paperwork” would create its own cost issues.
To LMA or Not to LMA
Anyone who has been around law library management for even a few years will have come across the LMA discussions. I’m always a bit careful about them. I like the purposes of a library maintenance agreement. It is a way to lock in price increases that can help with budgeting over a number of years. If you know with a high degree of certainty what you need to buy in print, and it isn’t going to vary much, the LMA is a great opportunity.
On the other hand, you may end up with a lock-in on print you do not need to keep collecting. Unfortunately, what seems to happen is that there is a desire to continue collecting the print—which I assume means someone has confirmed it’s being used by faculty for research, scholarship, or teaching—but the financial support erodes and the budget shrinks. Over time, this means the LMA gets fed at the expense of other parts of the library operation, since the LMA is contractual and other areas are not.
I am entirely open to dropping 100% of the print in our Thomson Reuters and RELX agreements. In fact, it seems to me that an either/or proposition is the most reasonable one to consider. Any law library that cuts, say, 20% of their print but stays under an LMA may find that they have fewer titles without 20% savings. I admire the law libraries that are able to manage the contractual 10% swap space, where they can add and drop without penalty on an annual basis. But I’m not sure we are staffed for that and, perhaps more importantly, I don’t think we have the variation in print demand from our faculty that would warrant that sort of regular swapping.
A law library that cuts 20% and does not stay under an LMA may see no print format savings at all. I have not investigated this seriously because I do not think that it is an outcome for us. Not only would our cost burden probably save the same in exchange for unfettered collection decisions, we would see our acquisition and inventory management costs (if only in time) increase significantly.
We are going to be taking some time to get the faculty’s pulse on the need for print formats (assuming we have electronic access to the relevant titles). When I pitched our faculty library committee on their print use—”do you use the print materials in the law library?”—I had one faculty member who, mic off on Zoom, just shook their head.
This was not a surprise. I was on a law school library team in 1999 and, even at that point, I had observed or had faculty relate to me that they no longer used the library print collection. It would have been astounding to me if that had reversed itself in the intervening decades. One colleague at another law library made the same 100% (or close enough) reduction in print as they left their LMA and had not found it had any service impact.
Eliminating most of our print collections should result in some cost savings. Admittedly, the legal publishers are charging for one format and giving the other “for free” so the savings may be harder to wring out of them. But we are spending staff time on receiving and managing print materials, filing in looseleafs, and the inevitable time chasing down one end of the purchasing and payables process or the other. These invisible costs are almost more important to me than the dollar per book costs.
It makes me wonder whether the publishers have a simplified invoicing approach for those who have standing orders outside of an LMA. Some system that provides for quarterly bulk invoicing for pieces received. When I look at the complexity of our payable system and the idea that I’d be getting invoicing for the annual or more frequent updates for 300+ titles, I shake my head. Frankly, the staff burden this creates militates against any but the most essential titles in a print format.
I am sometimes surprised, when I finally try to wrangle a problem, to find out what the pain points are. I am glad that over my career I have gotten more and more embedded into the financial operations. It is much more deliberate now and my purposeful transparency with my teams on our budget and how it is spent is to help them get the same awareness. Anyone who wants to lead a library team should make sure they can not only follow the money flow but understands the visible and invisible costs of any library expense.