Have you ever been frustrated by having to fill out a little slip of paper every time you Flex something at the UR Bookstore?
Well, those things do have a purpose other than to slow you down when you?re in a hurry. The purple slips that require you to write your name, signature and social security number are used to keep a record of the Flex transactions in the Bookstore.
Assistant manager Jim Taft said that the slips are used mainly as a backup system to maintain accurate bookkeeping. Once an employee swipes your Flex card the campus bookstore has no way of retrieving that information, so the purple slips are a way for them to keep track of Flex sales.
If the main computer system is down or there are other system problems, the slips are a way that the bookstore can manually keep track of the total Flex sales for a day. The purple slips ensure that the billing system is accurate.
The reason the slips require you to write down your social security number is because that is how each person?s account is labeled.
The bookstore needs to keep track of each individual account in the event that the Flex machine didn?t read the card properly and did something that affected the amount of money in a person?s Flex account. The social security numbers are used as an additional way to be able to easily identify a student.
