Every year, Cornell's bank account receives hundreds of wire transfers and ACH payments that arrive without enough information to route them anywhere. No invoice number. A vague or abbreviated vendor name. No department code. The money lands in a generic General Ledger holding account and sits there, unavailable to the departments it belongs to.
If a payment isn't resolved in time, New York State law requires Cornell to escheate the funds, turning them over to the state as unclaimed property. Historically, the backlog has peaked at $4 million.
Cheryl Barnes and Marie Graves on the Cash Management team were spending up to half their workday on this problem. The work is painstaking: searching old emails, Googling vendor abbreviations, calling contacts, cross-referencing past transactions. Some payments take hours to resolve. Many stay unresolved.
The active backlog stood at roughly $1 million across a couple hundred transactions. To tackle this problem, a collaboration between the AI Hub and Cornell Treasury Operations started in Fall 2025, and continued through the spring semester.
