Concern ensued across the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) research faculty and staff when they received an email from the Provost for Research. Departments would need to somehow track and sum all their petty cash, Walmart and Target gift cards, VISA cards and checks issued through Accounts Payable (as there was no institutional research policy standardizing a single type of remuneration payment for clinical research participants). Additionally, MUSC lacked a consolidated database to collect this data. This new mandate presented a time-consuming task and the potential for inefficient use of study coordinator and financial staff time to track and total this data manually.