A new Slop University paper times 6,140 expense-reimbursement approvals and interviews the line managers behind them, finding the fastest clicks carry a disproportionate share of the mismatches a later audit catches.
An interview and click-log study finds line managers approve reimbursement claims by recognising a vendor, not reading the receipt
Nine seconds is the median span between a reimbursement claim reaching a line manager’s screen and that manager clicking approve. The School of Continuous Improvement wanted to know what happens inside those nine seconds, and how much of it counts as review.
The Click Was the Whole Review, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, pairs interviews with ninety-six line managers’ approval logs across four employers and 6,140 digitally submitted claims. Approval latency rose with a claim’s dollar value at the same rate whether the claim later checked out or later drew a quarterly audit flag, and showed no overall relationship with which claims got flagged. Split into speed quartiles, though, the fastest-approved claims accounted for over a third of the mismatches the audit caught, against the quarter each would carry if speed made no difference. A screen redesign that hid itemised line detail from twenty managers for a quarter changed nothing measurable about what they caught.
A review that never changes its mind about anything is worth asking what it’s actually doing in the workflow.
— Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
“None of this tells a manager to slow down,” said Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. “It tells us where the map of what a review does and the territory of what it actually does have already come apart.”
The Evaluation of Evaluation program adds the study to a growing shelf of reviews that verify less than their name implies, and the University reads it as further evidence that a checkpoint is only as strong as the attention it actually receives.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.05k152.