Official Blog of NVCC's Purchasing Department

Greetings all,

We are pleased to announce a new procedure for purchasing gift cards at NVCC: Effective immediately, you are to work with your Campus Buyer to facilitate the purchase of approved gift cards for Faculty, Staff and Students with the Buyer’s P-Card.

This is a change to the previous policy which required a Check Request to be issued, approved and completed in order to purchase gift cards for students. While this process was previously an audit requirement, the Purchasing Department has been granted the authority from the VA Department of Accounts to purchase all gift cards with a Purchasing Department P-Card.

To clarify: Any and all gift card purchases will be made by your Campus Buyer with their P-Card. No one else will be authorized to make the purchase.

Attached to this email you will find the new Gift Card Authorization Form to begin using immediately for any and all gift card requests you may have. For instructions on how to use the form and submit to your Campus Buyer, please see the attached Gift Card Policy – Guidelines document.

The new form is posted in the Purchasing Blog in SharePoint. If you have any questions about the new process, please feel free to follow up with your Campus Buyer for more information.

Welcome to the NVCC Purchasing Department blog!

If you’re reading this, you probably already know a good bit about the Purchasing Department, but here’s a quick run-down of who we are just in case:

The Purchasing Department is responsible for the procurement of all goods and services for Northern Virginia Community College. Last year, we saw more than 9,000 individual orders come from our campuses. That kind of ordering keeps us pretty busy!

But we know it also keeps you pretty busy as well. Because while we may have the lion’s share of the responsibility for these purchases, the folks on the campuses that actually need these items have a lot that’s asked of them. If you’re reading this, my guess is that you may be one of those people… in which case, let me take this opportunity to thank you for all you do.

A lot gets asked of you aside from your regular duties. There are many things you need to remember when it comes to properly requesting, inputting and checking all of the things you need to purchase. Sometimes all that “stuff” can get pretty complicated.

That’s why we created this blog to act as a companion guide alongside our Sharepoint site. We want to give you as much information as we can so that you don’t have to simply guess whether or not you’re buying things the right way.

Specifically, this blog will act as a more “editorialized” resource for you, bringing you more in depth insight to the big ticket items that pop up from time to time. In the coming months and weeks, we think you’ll see what we mean by that. But what it boils down to is: There are certain things we ask you to do procurement wise that could use some greater explanation. In those instances, this blog will act as that in-depth explanation of what it all means.

We appreciate you stopping by and look forward to sharing with you all of the new things we have coming down the road.

Thanks for stopping by!

-The Purchasing Team