ASK Finance will soon be changing. Finance will be one of many College departments to use an upgraded and enhanced ASK system. Improvements to the system will lead to services being delivered in a more efficient way, freeing up staff to focus on more value-added activities.

Changes

The changes to the system will affect both users of the system (the agents dealing with tickets), and you, our customers, when interacting with ASK for required services or fixes to problems.

The main changes you need to be aware of are:

  • the creation of a single, new ASK website from where you can view help articles, raise new tickets, manage existing ones, and request specific products. This website will be a one-stop shop for all ASK interactions.  We strongly encourage you to use the ASK website as the best way to access our services;
  • changes to ticket reference numbers. As all department using ASK will be standardising, it is no longer appropriate to pre-fix our tickets with 'FIN'.  A Request of Service (e.g. a new supplier request) raised through the website will be raised with a reference pre-fixed with 'RITM', and an Incident with a reference pre-fixed with 'INC'.  Should you continue to email us, your ticket will be logged as an Enquiry (ENQ) before being converted by an agent to either a Request of Service (RITM) or an Incident (INC).

The following changes will not be visible to our customers or affect the way you interact with us, but will help us to provide a better level of service to you. They include:

  • a seamless transfer of tickets between teams to allow for better collaboration on queries;
  • improved process documentation and training to ensure our staff are providing a consistent and high quality customer service experience;
  • insightful reporting so we can better interpret the quality of our service provision, and understand how we can continuously improve it;
  • identification of repeatable tasks that can provide opportunities for automation.

Scope

Staff, students and external customers will be able to submit queries to the following Finance teams:

  • Account Code Change
  • Accounts Payable
  • Accounts Receivable
  • Expenses
  • Insurance
  • Finance Systems
  • Finance Training
  • P2P Helpdesk
  • Payroll & Pensions
  • Purchasing
  • Tax
  • Treasury

Self-service

One of the keys to providing you with a better level of service is by providing good help articles through the ASK website to enable self-service as needed.  It will take time for us to deliver the volume of content on the website that we would like, so please bear with us through this period.  This content will be continuously added to and improved so please do use the ASK website for all enquiries.

Further information

If you do have any questions or queries for Finance specifically please email askfin@imperial.ac.uk.

See  for an overall project perspective on the new system.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still send emails requests in to raise a ticket?

Yes, all existing methods of communication remain open, including any team email boxes. We do recommend you use the ASK website to raise and manage all requests as this will provide a more integrated service.

How much faster will my query be resolved?

By improving our customer content, improving our internal processes within Finance, and focussing more on reporting, we are confident that overall resolution times will diminish.  This will not happen overnight but we will be measuring this from day one, and we expect to see gradual improvements as we embed the new system.  We also intend to monitor and measure the quality of our service; this is as important as the speed of resolution.

What will you do on go-live with my open ticket in the current system?

The current ASK system will continue to be available for our agents to use one month after go-live of the new system.  During this time, agents will continue to resolve any open tickets in the old system and you will be communicated with as usual.  These tickets will continue with current FIN reference numbers.  After approximately one month any final open tickets will be migrated to the new system and given new reference numbers.  We will do our best to minimise the number of these migrations.