FY24 Values Focus

These examples of the UVAFinance value of Service Excellence were provided by UVAFinance Directors as a part of our FY24 Values Focus (see the Cultural Roadmap on our site).  We'll share a few stories every week all quarter long!

• Azamat Akhmedov, Senior Compliance Analyst:  Azamat was helping a Romanian student who had a difficult foreign national tax situation.  The student arrived from Germany after living there for a year, so it was unclear whether to use the German or Romanian tax treaty.  Azamat researched this ambiguous issue and provided helpful counsel to the student. 
• Krisztina Kiss, Finance Data & Tech Analyst:  Krisztina is excellent at following up on Salesforce or Jira tickets to make sure we fully understand the user's requirements (stated and unstated) before we begin work on any new reports or enhancement requests.  She fully documents the requirements and shares them with the user.
• Alison Hyler, Financial Analyst: Regularly engages with challenging stakeholders such as OSP with poise, kindness, professionalism, and grace.  Most recently, Alison worked with the Workday Support team to implement a process for "stuck" grant payments that have been billed.  Workday limitations will not allow the reversal of these payments for reissuing or canceling without errors.  After working closely with the Workday team, Alison created documents to illustrate the resolution process and explained it at length to management and then again to the OSP team several times.
• Patrick Wood, Procurement Specialist: The Football team had charter plane issues for the return trip back to Charlottesville from TN (the first game of the season) that required for UVA to find and use the services of another vendor.  Athletics texted Patrick Wood and myself at 7 AM on a Saturday morning needing an agreement with a new charter plane vendor reviewed and executed ASAP.  Patrick redlined the agreement and got it fully executed before 11AM on Saturday.
• Thomas Schneeberger, Workday Finance Senior Analyst: Thomas was responsible for the creation and management of our FY2023 year-end task list and calendar.  This task required more than just identifying and documenting Workday closing-related steps.  Thomas spent a considerable amount of time working with others in and outside of Finance to ensure what year-end activity and cutoffs were applicable to each area.  It was because of Thomas' service excellence that our year-end processes ran extremely smoothly.