More and more state grants are suggesting gas cards, or gift
cards as acceptable uses of grant and allocation funds. Could other
counties share their policies and procedures for gas cards and gift
cards? We find the process labor intensive including an OnBase form to
obtain supervisor approval, individual inventory tracking of each card, and
then if it is for a child in social services it would require entry in SSIS.
Thanks Julie!
Christine
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Christine Partlow • Business Manager • (763) 682-7409
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Hi Christine,
ReplyDeleteOur Child Protection Unit purchases gift cards and gas cards for their clients. Purchases are approved by the Child Support Supervisors, the Case Aide's use their unit's credit card to buy them, track the cards, and code the monthly credit card statement. The credit card statement is then given to me to enter the transactions in to SSIS as posted payments. The cards come from a mix of general funds and grant dollars. Hope this helps. Caleb
Hi everyone
ReplyDeleteI was also asked how to get money out the door more timely in order to better utilize grant dollars. We only print checks every two weeks and so they often need money faster for emergencies. Do any of you use a petty cash fund or gift cards (gas card or preloaded visa)? I see some have already answered that they do use gift cards... How do you handle them at the end of the grant cycle if you haven't used them up?
In Norman county we only purchase gift cards if we have an intended client for them. For example some of the activities we purchased for kids out of CMH Respite funds, we also gave the parents gas cards to be able to get the kids to these activities. We decided on a dollar amount and number of cards we were willing to give each family based on the amount of times they'd need to drive to get to the activities and purchase them all at once. We luckily were able to bring a check to the gas station to pay for all the cards, so we had already entered payments in SSIS for all the families. In Norman we don't purchase cards to just have on hand. Once we get the cards we give them all out at once, even if it's 10 cards, the clients are responsible to keep track of them. It works well for us because there isn't a ton of extra tracking that needs to be done.
ReplyDeleteHope this helps!
Taylor Holzer
Norman County Social Services
Ramsey County built our own MS Access system to handle gift cards. A worker requests gift cards via email, a clerk enters the request (from multiple workers) into the Access program, and notifies the supervisor. The supervisor goes into the Access program to approve. The worker is automatically notified when their request is approved by the sup. At that point, the worker comes up to Accounting to retrieve the cards. We have a large volume of gift card requests so we keep hundreds on hand. When Accounting receives the worker's request, they go into the Access system, pull it up by the client ID number, and enter the serial numbers from the gift card. Then Accounting prints a receipt for the client to sign. This receipt has the gift card serial numbers, date, all the relevant info on it. The worker must return the signed receipt back to Accounting within 7 days (auditor guidelines). Once a signed receipt is returned, Accounting goes into the Access program and closes the receipt out. We also have several kinds of reports that we can pull from this Access system, including which receipts have not been returned signed yet.
ReplyDeleteOur Purchasing Dept uses a "general" accounting string to code these gift cards to on their p-cards. Once a month, a journal entry is created to reallocate all of these gift cards FROM the general accounting string TO their appropriate funding string/grant/client ID/etc. The funding string is a requirement to enter the request into the Access system, so it is easy to gather that information from a report.
Though the Access system has worked for us in the past, if you have a very large amount of cards as we do, I would advise against using it. It will likely work well if you do not have too many of these requests.
Hope this helps
Alex Gayl
Ramsey Co Accounts Receivable
Aleksandra.Gayl@co.ramsey.mn.us