By Joseph Beam, Director of Marketing and Communications, AACRAO, Live from #AACRAO2026
Though some sessions at the 111th AACRAO Annual Meeting announce themselves with packed rooms and standing audiences. Others unfold a bit more quietly, tucked into smaller spaces, drawing in the curious. This session, “Audit Your Institutional Billing: Finding $2M in the Couch Cushions,” led by Steve McKellips of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, fell into the latter category, but what it lacked in attendance, it more than made up for in substance. By the end, it felt less like a presentation and more like a warning, told with just enough humor to keep the weight of the subject from landing too heavily.
The premise was simple: what if your institution wasn’t collecting all the tuition and fees it thought it was? Not hypothetically, not occasionally, but systematically and consistently over years. The presenter walked us through a real case at a Midwestern university in which billing inaccuracies affected as many as 25% of incoming students over a six-year period. The result was not a single error to be corrected, but a compounding series of misalignments that quietly eroded institutional revenue over time.
As an aside, one aspect that made this session particularly engaging was the presenter’s tone, a bit wry, maybe a little jaded, the kind you might expect from someone who has spent a long time navigating complexity and come out the other side with both insight and a healthy sense of perspective. Dense financial concepts, which might otherwise have felt impenetrable, were translated into clear, relatable examples. It created an environment where attendees could follow the narrative without losing sight of its seriousness.
At the heart of the issue was a combination of accounting assumptions and product implementation decisions that, individually, may have seemed reasonable. However, when layered together, they created gaps in billing logic that went largely unnoticed.
One of the most striking points was how the adoption of a cloud-based system contributed to the problem. Like many institutions, the university had implemented a solution that promised efficiency and modernization. Yet the system was not fully aligned with the institution’s existing processes. Rather than adapting the system, the institution adjusted its processes to fit the tool. In doing so, it introduced inconsistencies that, over time, became mistakes that were embedded into daily operations.
This dynamic felt particularly relevant as many institutions are navigating similar transitions, often under pressure to adopt new technologies quickly. The session served as a reminder that even well-intentioned changes can introduce risk if they aren’t carefully evaluated against established practices.
Another key takeaway centered on controls and oversight. Ensuring that net tuition revenue is properly collected is not simply a financial exercise; it is a matter of institutional sustainability. The presenter emphasized that strong controls can mitigate the need for additional staffing by preventing issues before they scale. In this case, the absence of those controls allowed discrepancies to persist far longer than anyone would have expected.
During the Q&A, several attendees asked how the issue could have gone undetected for so long. The answer pointed to a combination of siloed responsibilities, assumptions about ownership, and a lack of holistic review processes. In other words, no single failure, but a system that lacked the mechanisms to catch itself. Institutions rarely look inward when looking for solutions.
What lingered after the session was not just the scale of the error, but the clarity of its lesson. Institutions often assume that core functions like billing are operating as intended, particularly when no obvious issues surface. This session challenged that assumption directly. It underscored the importance of regularly auditing systems, validating processes, and checking that the basics are done well (a concept that will be familiar to those who attended the opening plenary session with General Russel L. Honoré).
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