‘It is a real problem for us’, said Angnyeta Larson. ‘We now have only 10 working days between all the expense claims coming from the departmental coordinators and authorizing payments on the next month’s payroll. This really is not long enough and we are already having problems during peak times.’ Angnyeta was the department head of the internal financial control department of a metropolitan authority in southern Sweden. Part of her department’s responsibilities included checking and processing expense claims from staff throughout the metropolitan authority and authorizing payment to the salaries payroll section. She had 12 staff who were trained to check expense claims and all of them were devoted full-time to processing the claims in the two weeks (10 working days) prior to the deadline for informing the salaries section. The number of claims submitted over the year averaged around 3200, but this could vary between 1000 during the quiet summer months up to 4300 in peak months. Processing claims involved checking receipts, checking that claims met with the strict financial allowances for different types of expenditure, checking all calculations, obtaining more data from the claimant if necessary, and (eventually) sending an approval notification to salaries. The total processing time was on average 20 minutes per claim.

● How many staff does the process need on average, for the lowest demand, and for the highest demand?

● If a more automated process involving electronic submission of claims could reduce the average processing time to 15 minutes, what effect would this have on the required staffing levels?

● If department coordinators could be persuaded to submit their batched claims earlier (not always possible for all departments) so that the average time between submission of the claims to the finance department and the deadline for informing salaries section was increased to 15 working days, what effect would this have?