TAMU brings flexibility and control to campus-wide spend

Managing spend across a university system that never stands still

At Texas A&M, expense management doesn’t follow one standard path. The university operates within a broader system of more than 20 campuses and agencies, all state institutions, each functioning independently. That means different travel policies, routing requirements, budget controls, risk tolerances, and reporting expectations.

For Kyle Metcalf, Director of Accounts Payable at Texas A&M, the challenge was clear.

“Texas A&M is a system, so we have over 20 different campuses and agencies, all state institutions. They all function independently. They all have their own routing needs. They all have their own various travel policies. So there’s very little that is consistent across all of our different universities and agencies.” — Kyle Metcalf, Director of Accounts Payable, Texas A&M

The institution needed a system that could support local variation without losing central control. It also had to meet state, federal, and institutional requirements, including grant-related rules, receipt requirements, travel approvals, and other external reporting obligations.

“That’s one of the challenges that we ran into with our previous provider, and one of the reasons that we started looking around,” Metcalf said. “Specifically, the amount of custom fields that we could put on a header or on an expense entry form. We had maxed those out. So if the state of Texas came down and said, ‘Hey, we need you to capture an additional piece of information on your expense reports,’ we would either not be able to comply or we would have to lose a field we already had.”

Key challenges included:

• More than 20 campuses and agencies with different approval paths, policies, and local controls
• State, federal, grant, and institutional compliance requirements
• Prior system limitations around custom fields and workflow flexibility
• Faculty and staff who needed a simpler experience, not more administrative work
• Manual follow-up for aged transactions, unapplied card charges, and delayed approvals
• Risk exposure when transactions sat too long without review

Why Emburse

Texas A&M chose Emburse because the platform could flex to fit the university’s operating model, not force the university into a rigid process.

“Duty of care has become a big thing in the last five, ten years,” Metcalf said. “We have students that travel. We have student groups that travel. We move athletic teams across the country and the world. All those have different internal stakeholders where they need to be informed. They need to review the trip. They need to make a decision on whether that trip should be allowed from a risk management perspective.”

Emburse gave Texas A&M the ability to configure those workflows directly. Instead of waiting on a vendor or help desk to make most changes, administrators could adjust routing, rules, fields, and approvals themselves.

“We don’t wanna have to rely on other people. We like to dig in and figure out what it can and can’t do,” said Metcalf.

For a hands-on finance team, that control changed the nature of the system. Emburse became something Texas A&M could actively shape as needs evolved.

Solution highlights

With Emburse, Texas A&M built a configurable expense management program that supports institutional control without adding unnecessary friction for faculty and staff.

Key capabilities included:

• Analytics and Insight Advisor: Custom dashboards and automated notifications help Texas A&M monitor aging transactions, pending approvals, and other risk signals.
• Conditional pre-approval routing: Travel requests can route to the right stakeholder based on destination, student involvement, high-risk countries, export controls, and other risk factors.
• Flexible expense routing: Reports can route based on purchase type, funding source, campus, agency, account, or local approval structure.
• Group approvals: Large departments can route reports to a shared queue of business staff, helping distribute workload instead of bottlenecking approvals with one person.
• Single-line send-back: Approvers can return only the expense line that needs correction instead of sending back an entire report.
• Email-based approvals: Expense owners can review and approve directly by email, helping meet state sign-off requirements without forcing every faculty member into the system.
• Self-service configuration: Texas A&M administrators can make many workflow and rule changes internally, helping the program adapt quickly.
• One-card flexibility: Faculty no longer need to manage separate travel and payment cards. Charges can flow into the eWallet and be assigned to the right report type.
• AI-assisted receipt and hotel folio capture: Receipts can be emailed or captured by mobile, with Emburse helping extract key fields, categorize expenses, and itemize hotel folios.
• Real-time card notifications: Cardholders can capture receipts immediately after a transaction, helping reduce missing receipts and improve compliance.

Business impact: More control, fewer bottlenecks, better visibility

The shift to Emburse gave Texas A&M more control over complex workflows and more room to design expense processes around the realities of higher education.

“We have some very large departments that provide centralized services for their faculty and staff,” Metcalf said. “It’s too much for one person. So when someone submits a report on one of their accounts, it routes to a group of five business staff. Those five business staff all have access to the same approval queue.”

For faculty, the system reduces the friction that often gets blamed on expense management itself. Superdelegates can prepare pre-approvals and expense reports on behalf of faculty, leaving the faculty member to simply approve when needed.

The one-card approach also simplifies travel and procurement behavior by reducing the chance of using the wrong card for the wrong transaction.

Results and improvements include:

• Configurable workflows for 20+ campuses and agencies
• More precise pre-trip routing for duty of care, student travel, export controls, and high-risk destinations
• Flexible approval paths for split funding and cross-campus spend
• Reduced rework through single-line send-back
• Easier faculty approvals through email-based certification
• Simplified card usage through a one-card model
• Improved receipt capture through mobile notifications and AI-assisted receipt processing
• Less manual follow-up through automated aging notifications
• Stronger risk controls for transactions aging past key thresholds

The biggest shift may be cultural. Texas A&M can now listen to stakeholders, identify where users are running into friction, and adjust the system around those needs. That matters in an academic environment where change management takes patience, clarity, and proof that the process is not just being enforced, but improved.

Strategic visibility with Emburse Analytics and Insight Advisor

Texas A&M’s analytics program turned reporting from a manual follow-up exercise into a more proactive control system.

Before, aged card transactions required manual review and outreach. Someone had to run a report, identify outstanding items, and contact users or departments. With Emburse Analytics and Insight Advisor, Texas A&M created dashboards and automated notifications based on aging buckets, users, superdelegates, department heads, and prescribed timelines.

Now, reminders can go out at 30, 60, and 90 days. Approvers with reports sitting in their queues can receive automated nudges. The help desk can be notified when transactions reach critical thresholds. At 45 days, Texas A&M can suspend cards until transactions are submitted.

That visibility is not just operational. It is protective.

When transactions sit untouched for too long, the risk increases. It could be a forgotten reconciliation. It could be a compromised card. It could be employee fraud. Emburse gives Texas A&M a clearer way to find those risks earlier and act before they grow.

“I will tell analytics and the Insight Advisor service to anyone that I can. Cannot recommend that service highly enough,” said Metcalf.

Less expense work, more mission work

Faculty were not hired to build expense reports, but to teach, research, mentor, and serve students. For Texas A&M, that reality shaped the way expense management had to work.

“No faculty were hired to create expense reports… So when we were implementing Emburse, we were very sensitive to that fact. We wanted to make the faculty’s job as easy as we could while still working within the constraints of being a state agency.” — Kyle Metcalf, Director of Accounts Payable, Texas A&M

Texas A&M still has to meet state requirements, federal requirements, grant obligations, receipt rules, and local policies across a complex university system. But with Emburse, compliance can be built into the workflow instead of pushed onto faculty as extra administrative work.

“Those superdelegates can access that faculty member’s profile,” Metcalf said. “They can create their PAs and submit them. They can create their expense reports and submit them so that the only thing the faculty has to do is hit that approve button on an email.”

For Texas A&M, better expense management is not just a win for finance but also a way to give time back to the people the institution exists to support, such as fewer interruptions for faculty, and to help its finance teams preserve the governance that the institution needs. It’s altogether creating an ecosystem of efficiency to prepare its students to become future leaders in their chosen field.