Higher education Finance teams today are tasked with managing a complex and challenging business landscape – one that requires balancing evolving student needs, increasing people and infrastructure costs, resource constraints and more. The ability to quickly problem-solve and steer the university through these challenges while maintaining financial sustainability is daunting. But what if universities could not only navigate this complexity but also thrive? Corporate Performance Management (CPM) makes both possible. Designed to help maximize business impact, CPM empowers higher ed Finance teams to ensure their institutions keep up with the pace of change, uncertainty and organizational complexity.
The value of modern Finance lies not in eliminating complexity but in effectively navigating it.
Now more than ever, higher ed Finance teams face a diverse set of pressures and challenges, including the following financial constraints, external forces, internal complexities and operational obstacles:
The ability to adapt to the above pressures and changing landscape while ensuring financial sustainability is complex with the tools and processes colleges and universities are using today. To be more agile, Finance leaders are looking for ways to simplify and scale processes to keep pace with rapid change and plan effectively.
Traditional Higher Education Planning Practices
Traditionally, higher education institutions have used disconnected Finance processes and systems for planning and reporting. Those efforts have primarily focused on the cumbersome, time-intensive annual budget process. While the annual budget is important for funding allocations, control and accountability of spend, and communication with stakeholders, it relies on the assumption of operating in a stable and predictable business environment. Today’s rapidly changing and uncertain business landscape shatters that assumption because the budget can quickly become outdated and difficult to revise.
To address these limitations, colleges and universities must evolve to more agile processes that emphasize trust, collaboration, innovation and risk management.
By design, CPM helps higher education Finance teams bring together an institution’s data, analytics, plans and reporting – all in one place – to conquer complexity and enable confident decision-making.
What Is CPM?
CPM is an overarching term used to describe the methodologies, metrics, and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an organization.
CPM encompasses the core Finance processes of planning, reporting and analytics, with the goal of optimizing performance by aligning strategic initiatives with resources, activities and results. Accordingly, CPM provides business leaders with a framework focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) and the metrics to measure “success.”
That success may look different for each institution because of varying educational missions, communities served, programs offered, and so on. Fundamentally, Finance leaders can define ‘success’ as the ability of an institution to achieve financial sustainability while effectively fulfilling the university mission and strategic initiatives (see Figure 1).
Shifting the institution’s financial processes to include CPM to track strategic priorities, goals and initiatives is imperative for long-term financial sustainability.
CPM gives Finance leaders peace of mind by giving them the tools to navigate the complexity and best serve their institution’s mission and students. How? By enabling more trust in data, better collaboration with stakeholders and more agility in decision-making.
Trust in Numbers
CPM tools combine financial and operational data from various sources to provide a clear view of institutional performance. This view allows Finance to use one source of truth to monitor performance in real-time across various activities, including auxiliaries, academics, research and more.
Such transparency empowers Finance to have a comprehensive view of data and be more confident decision-makers.
For example, as resource constraints continue to expand and change, Finance must understand the current state of funding resources. Are they tied up in commitments? Are they being used for future capital initiatives? The answers to these questions and others provide transparency on how funding is being used to help identify where resources are being underutilized or what areas need additional funding. Recognizing programs with excess funds creates an opportunity to instead invest them effectively in infrastructure, facilities, teaching and other areas in need of additional funding. Finance can look at how to best support each area by asking questions to maximize the impact.
By having a sole source of truth for financial and operational data, higher education Finance leaders can trust the numbers and maximize the impact on the institution.
Improved Collaboration
Getting stakeholder alignment across the institution is tough, but having clear strategic goals and priorities aligned with resources, activities and results helps focus collaboration efforts. When everyone is working toward achieving the same metrics and KPIs, Finance can better partner with departments and programs.
For example, an institution may have an initiative to increase academic program returns by expanding a current program. Having core KPIs, such as administrative costs per student or net tuition revenue per student, helps create direction on how to set up a new initiative for financial success. For such efforts, focused communication and collaboration are essential.
And with CPM, discussions between Finance and stakeholders can be better focused on specific items. Here are a few examples:
- What costs are affiliated with marketing efforts?
- What kind of financial discounts or incentives can be offered?
- How can rising administrative costs be managed?
In other words, the different departments and programs can maintain their independence and innovative thinking while working in unison with Finance to achieve strategic priorities with financial sustainability.
Increased Agility
CPM tools also enable Finance teams to leverage real-time data and scenario modeling capabilities to support agile decision-making. By having one source of truth for financial and operational data, institutions can see the current state of the business and model alternative futures based on different assumptions (e.g., enrollment shifts, interest rate changes, government funding modifications, etc.).
These capabilities allow stakeholders to understand the potential impact of different scenarios and more quickly respond to changes in the budget, forecast or strategic plan (see Figure 2). In turn, the university or college can take advantage of new opportunities and/or minimize risk. And in the current volatile times, the resulting increased agility offers a true competitive advantage.
Confident Decision-Making
Overall, incorporating CPM in your institution will bring more confidence in the financial success of your college or university. Why? Because CPM supports long-term sustainability in the following ways:
- Unifies complex and fragmented business processes to provide a single, holistic view of institutional performance.
- Focuses financial planning processes across the institution to ensure relevancy and purpose in support of the institution’s mission and goals.
- Equips the institution to identify and mitigate potential risks and take advantage of innovative opportunities.
Conclusion
In sum, CPM helps Finance overcome the diverse set of pressures and challenges in the current higher educational landscape. How? By enabling more trust in numbers, better collaboration, increased agility and more confident decision-making. Through those benefits, CPM facilitates actionable insights that will empower and improve strategic decision-making and long-term financial sustainability.
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Want to learn more about how OneStream can empower your higher education Finance team? Download our Higher Education solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.
Data management in higher education financial reporting presents significant challenges for Finance teams to navigate. And while some of these challenges resemble those shared by other types of organizations, higher education Finance teams must contend with many data challenges specific to their domain. More specifically, data management challenges within higher-education institutions arise from various causes, including multiple funding sources, diverse revenue streams and complex regulations.
Sources of Higher Education Financial Reporting Data Complexity
What are some of the complexities in data management that higher education Finance teams face?
One of the primary complexities for financial reporting is that higher education institutions must manage and report on multiple funding sources. Such sources can include government grants, private donations, tuition and fees, and endowment income. For each funding source, Finance teams must then follow a corresponding and unique set of regulations and reporting requirements. That variability makes it difficult for Finance teams to ensure compliance and accurate reporting.
Another complexity in data management is accommodating for diverse revenue streams common in higher education institutions. These streams can include student housing, dining services, bookstore sales and other auxiliary services. Because each revenue stream has its own set of financial transactions and reporting requirements, Finance teams face challenges when aiming to consolidate and report on the overall financial performance of the institution.
In addition to funding and revenue data, higher education financial reporting, budgeting and planning all draw on a variety of other data sources. Some of those sources include human resource data, including staff/faculty salaries and benefits, and facility data such as physical assets.
Additionally, complexities in data management for higher education financial reporting include the following:
- Silos: Different departments and systems within the institution may collect and store data separately, leading to a lack of consistency and integration across the institution.
- Variety: Most higher education institutions comprise various components with unique data requirements (e.g., the chart of accounts for research facilities vs. a college will significantly differ).
- Security: Higher education institutions handle sensitive operational and financial information and must ensure such data is secure and protected.
- Accessibility: Data can be stored in a variety of formats and locations, making access to data difficult for Finance teams during the reporting process.
- Governance: Without proper governance, Finance teams can struggle to ensure data is accurate, complete and compliant with regulations.
- Integration: Integrating data with other systems (e.g., student information systems, financial systems, enterprise resource planning systems, etc.) can be a complex process requiring significant IT resources.
Conquering Data Management for Higher Education Institutions
Many higher education Finance teams struggle with the complexities above and find it difficult to accurately report on the financial performance of the institution and ensure compliance with regulations. Why? The struggles mainly occur because many higher education Finance teams rely on a mix of tools, such as siloed spreadsheets, legacy corporate performance management (CPM) software and BI applications. Doing so means Finance must invest an inordinate amount of time and manual effort to manage data instead of focusing on building decision insights that benefit the institutions.
How can Finance teams overcome these challenges?
Many higher education Finance teams have answered that question with a modern CPM Finance solution. OneStream (see Figure 1), for example, enables Finance teams to conquer data complexity in higher education financial reporting by providing the following capabilities:
- Seamless integration to data sources: By directly connecting to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other data sources, OneStream provides a single source of truth for financial information and complete access to all data sources within the platform with full drill- and drill-through capabilities.
- Unified platform: OneStream provides a centralized platform for financial data, making it easy for Finance teams to access and analyze financial information from various sources.
- Built-in financial intelligence and governance: OneStream natively understands and manages financial data and provides Finance teams with full audit and governance capabilities. Data within the platform is controlled to ensure all users have access to only the data they are authorized to use.
- Extensible dimensionality: This unique capability enables Finance teams to manage data specifically configured for individual operating units while maintaining top-level institutional standards. For example, a research facility and an academic college each have a distinct chart of accounts for budgeting, planning and reporting, but both roll up to an overall institutional version. And they do so within the same solution and user experience.
- Data blending: OneStream allows customers to capture and blend detailed transactional, relational and multi-dimensional data in a single platform. This capability allows users to perform detailed driver-based planning, or comprehensive analysis and data visualization with high performance – all within a single application.
- Sophisticated reporting and data visualizations: OneStream’s flexible financial reporting and analysis capabilities eliminate the need for Finance teams to waste time manually creating reports.
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Want to learn more about how OneStream can empower your higher education Finance team? Download our Higher Education solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.
Finance teams in most organizations often interact with non-Finance groups and individuals when planning, budgeting and forecasting. At higher education institutions, these interactions typically include multiple rounds of input from department heads, research leaders and medical administrators. Unique higher-ed planning requirements – such as position planning, program profitability, tuition planning and grant planning – further complicate the processes. Under those conditions, many institutions struggle to achieve adequate collaboration using outdated tools, such as disparate spreadsheets.
Why is using spreadsheets a problem? Well, using them for planning, budgeting and forecasting places a heavy burden on higher education Finance teams. Instead of investing time in valuable analysis and sharing insights, teams must devote hours to data wrangling and managing manual processes. That means wasting a ton of time on non-productive tasks, such as keeping track of individual spreadsheets, managing divergent versions, correcting errors and keeping track of each end-user’s progress.
Excel® Spreadsheets: A Comfortable and Familiar Tool – But at What Cost?
Since most users are familiar with using Excel® to manage data, many higher education Finance teams rely on spreadsheets as the path of least resistance for planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. Why? By working within Excel® – in which users already know how to build formulas, apply formatting and interact with data – non-Finance users can quickly complete relevant tasks while staying focused on their respective roles.
In short, end users don’t want to learn a new tool for a simple reason. Doing so will take time away from users’ daily responsibilities.
But here’s the conundrum: Non-Finance groups require an intuitive interface that allows for accomplishing tasks without distracting from core responsibilities. At the same time, Finance teams need a unified solution that provides them with governance, control, and, most importantly, time for developing high-value analysis and strategic insights.
Engage All Users with a Modern Higher Education Finance Solution
Many higher education institutions have found a best-of-both-worlds solution to the above challenges with the OneStream Intelligent Finance platform. With OneStream, these institutions empower BOTH Finance and non-Finance users with a solution that streamlines processes and reduces learning curves. How are these benefits achieved? By providing users with engagement options, including OneStream’s accessible interface, embedded spreadsheets and OneStream’s Excel® Add-In.
The Excel® Add-In provides users with the capability to perform all their planning, budgeting and forecasting tasks directly within the familiar Excel® environment. In addition, since these spreadsheets are unified with the OneStream platform, users can enter and update data, view interactive reports, perform data analysis, and more. Users can also access OneStream Cube Views and Data Grids across dimensions while leveraging the complete analysis capabilities of Excel®.
The Excel® Add-In provides the following benefits:
- Enables broad platform adoption by engaging users with a comfortable and familiar interface.
- Empowers users with flexible interface options for financial close, reporting, budgeting, planning, and data entry tasks.
- Maintains transparency and internal controls for each user with secure, self-service access to the appropriate data for users’ respective roles.
Cube Views, a central component of the OneStream platform, can be used for reports, data entry templates and the monitoring of Finance processes. Within the Excel® Add-In, data is pulled directly from OneStream rather than a simple data dump that requires a pivot table or formulas to retrieve the information.
The unification of spreadsheets with OneStream means they are fully bi-directional in their data flow. For in-depth ad-hoc analysis, users can drill all the way down to transaction-level details. To enable data entry and updates, users can also work within Excel® forms that help guide users and streamline their tasks. Users also have full access to the formatting and reporting capabilities of Excel®, including charts and graphs (see Figure 1).
Because the Add-In is unified with OneStream, users are entering their data directly into the platform when updating spreadsheets. What does that mean for Finance teams? It means all those late nights spent keeping track of divergent spreadsheets and manually transferring information become bad memories of the past.
Enable Unified Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting with OneStream
Beyond the benefits highlighted above, Finance teams gain greater process insight and control. Whether users are using the OneStream interface or Excel®, Finance maintains complete control of data and can designate what information each user can view and update. OneStream also maintains complete audit trails, platform security and user-defined access levels no matter which interface is used. Plus, the solution provides Finance teams with deep insight into the human side of the process via the ability to plan process steps, assign task owners and track dependencies – all while maintaining real-time visibility into process progression and gaining insight into process bottlenecks.
The Excel® Add-In is one of several capabilities OneStream provides to enable higher education institution Finance teams to effectively collaborate across their organizations and optimize planning, budgeting and forecasting processes.
At OneStream, we call this Intelligent Finance.
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Want to learn more about how the OneStream Intelligent Finance platform and the Excel® Add-In can empower your higher education institution? Download our Excel® Add-In Solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.
In higher education institutions, Budget and Finance leaders have a key responsibility: reporting of financial, operational and compliance numbers. Producing an accurate book of record, income statement and balance sheet to represent an institution’s financial position is critical to that reporting. It’s equally important to empower decision-makers with insights from ad-hoc and periodic reports. Those insights support faster and more informed decision-making for financial planning, forecasting, and operational decisions.
Beyond the internal aspects, higher education institutions also have significant financial reporting requirements to external stakeholders. A few examples are regulatory agencies, boards of trustees/governors, grant providers, and lenders in support of debt covenants.
Errors, inconsistencies, or omissions in any reports, internal or external, can have wide-reaching, negative effects on the health of the institution and strategic decisions. In today’s dynamic economic climate, accurate reporting is more critical than ever, but many higher education institutions are still hampered by a lack of confidence in their own reporting.
Higher Education Challenges in Operational and Financial Reporting
Why are so many institutions struggling to meet stakeholder financial reporting needs with full confidence? The primary reason is the complexity of building a single source of truth from multiple data sources across the institution. Institutional entities – such as different schools, research centers, athletics, and housing – each have different purposes, funding sources, and operational requirements. Typically, each of these entities maintains their financial and operational data in separate systems using a variety of solutions and siloed spreadsheets, a process that’s drowning in complexity. Plus, Finance teams often waste tremendous time simply managing and moving data instead of focusing on what really matters: providing insightful reporting and strategic decision guidance. What’s the result?
Unfortunately, Finance teams all too often simply lose trust and confidence in their own financial reporting and planning processes. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Addressing the Challenges and Unique Requirements of Higher Education Financial Reporting
To answer the challenges in financial reporting, Finance leaders at higher education institutions need to have good reporting capabilities while addressing a variety of stakeholder reporting needs. And at the heart of those capabilities, Finance leaders must have confidence in the timeliness and accuracy of their data.
The key to this confidence is 100% visibility from reports to sources. All financial and operational data must be clearly visible and easily accessible through a single interface with full integration to all source systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools and other systems.
Achieving this requires a modern Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution – one with financial data quality at its core. That data then gracefully integrates with a myriad of source systems while providing powerful, yet easy-to-use reporting and financial planning & analysis capabilities.
Conquering Complexity in Higher Education Financial Reporting with OneStream
OneStream’s Intelligent Finance platform (see Figure 1) integrates with any open GL/ERP system, including those dedicated to higher education. As part of OneStream’s unified solution for financial consolidation, budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, analytics, and financial data quality, the built-in advanced reporting and analytic capabilities in the platform empower higher education institutions.
OneStream provides both a user-friendly interface and the option for users to accomplish data entry, analysis, and reporting all entirely through an Excel® interface. In addition to Excel®, the platform tightly integrates with Microsoft Word® and PowerPoint® to enable the creation of accessible pixel-perfect reports, ready right out of the box.
Here are some other key reporting and analytics capabilities for higher-ed teams:
Interactive Dashboards: Finance and other users are empowered by self-service, interactive dashboards (see Figure 2) that combine tables, charts, graphs, and other visualizations to provide unparalleled, immediate access to current financial and operational insights
Figure 3: Built-In Financial Data Quality Management in OneStream
Built-In Financial Data Quality: Financial data quality (see Figure 3) is a core part of the platform and provides direct integrations to source data, financial intelligence, and strict controls to deliver confidence and reliability in data quality.
Guided Reporting: Both Finance and end-users are empowered to create and manage their own powerful analytic reports with the ability to drill down on any dimension in graphs, charts, reports, and grids to get answers quickly. This capability includes a built-in report library of pre-formatted row or column sets and can instantly export reports to Excel, PDF, or any other standard format.
Excel® Integration: Users are enabled to enter and update data, quickly create reports, and conduct powerful ad-hoc analysis entirely within the Excel® interface they already know. For end, users who prefer the agility of using spreadsheets across the financial close, planning, reporting, and analysis processes OneStream’s Excel® Integration maximizes ease of use and control.
Production Reporting: Financial and operational data are unified from across the institution into a governed, flexible solution – without copying information between fragmented sources and tools. The platform also delivers key insights with detailed and pixel-perfect reports for financial, statutory, and management reporting at speed to capitalize on opportunities and mitigate risk. Users can even access 50+ pre-built web reports.
Microsoft Office Blend: OneStream’s integration with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel enables users to combine content with OneStream reports, charts, and data content to deliver rich, visually stunning reports. Users can also automate board book and executive report creation and streamline updates with immediate data refresh capabilities for required analysis without re-work.
Conclusion
It is critical for Finance teams at higher education institutions to strengthen their ability to provide strategic guidance and insightful reporting. However, they must build trust in their data to succeed in this effort. By unifying data sources across planning and reporting processes, Finance leaders can finally move beyond manual spreadsheets and processes while setting a new foundation for collaboration and confidence in the data analyltics required to support the institution’s mission for years to come.
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Interested in learning more about how OneStream unleashes higher education Finance teams and enables trust in data and confidence in financial reporting? Download our Higher Education solution brief, or contact us for a demonstration.
Making the right financial decisions in higher education begins with trust. Why trust? Because success in higher education is a team effort. Plus, too many things are simply out of your individual control since today’s environment is one of constant change. Politics, public health, revenue disruptions, and workforce challenges all play a part in your daily operations. As a leader in a complex organization who wants to get things done, you must have confidence in your team’s character and ability. That confidence is the very definition of trust. And it’s also why financial forecasting software is mission critical – it gives you trust in your numbers.
The Benefits of Trust
The benefits of trust can be easily seen in how your team is affected:
- Trust empowers your team to think and communicate freely. The sharing of new ideas and engaging in healthy discussion over the merits are important to institutional progress. Trust allows these conversations to happen. And teams that trust each other have discussions and debates on any issue, no matter how difficult.
- Trust creates an environment of transparency. Effective teamwork means relying on other people to complete large projects and solve issues. Trust enhances transparency by reducing the fear of judgment. In turn, individual contributors are free to complete tasks, and if issues arise, trusting teams bring those issues to the forefront and address them.
- Trust inspires collaboration. Working as part of a team becomes enjoyable when it’s easy to communicate. When there’s a common goal. When everyone is held accountable. And when there’s no negative energy to constrain the team. Not to mention, people love to collaborate with people they like, and it’s easier to like your team if it’s built on a foundation of trust.
Yet all those benefits don’t automatically transfer to other areas. Trusting your team is one thing – but what if you don’t trust your numbers?
Relevance Has a Need for Speed
Accuracy in your numbers is necessary, but relevance is what shapes future financial decisions. Your team spends a lot of time and effort pulling and combining data to produce financial plans, budgets, reports, and presentations that communicate where you are and where you’re going. But financial documents delivered on a set schedule are no longer good enough. Those documents must also be relevant.
One of the hurdles to effective planning and budgeting, and the biggest obstacle to numeric relevance, is ensuring that today’s challenges are considered as you move forward through the rest of the year and into long-range plans. Is your information stale by the time it reaches the board/committee? After all, it’s hard to charge forward when you’re always waiting. And if you spend too much time looking backward, it may be time to look at how budgeting and forecasting software can push you forward.
What’s the bug in this system? Well, it’s time. Keeping your numbers relevant simply takes too much time.
How, then, do you add relevance to the equation? How do you ensure you’re tying current activity to future plans? Rolling forecasts are the perfect solution. Agile, iterative, and consistent forecasting is the cornerstone for building a foundation of relevance and trust in your numbers within financial forecasting software.
As Situations Change, So Should Your Actions
Static budgets built within legacy financial forecasting software aren’t flexible enough to react to what’s happening in real-time. Meanwhile, rolling forecasts are designed to change and adapt throughout the year, providing more value if large and/or sudden changes negatively affect your institution.
Rolling forecasts (see Figure 1) are dynamic, just like your daily operations, and continually adapt and update your planning processes against actual performance and trends. How? Rolling forecasts allow for more accurate and multifaceted forecasting by re-calibrating the forecast based on changes in both internal variables (e.g., mergers and tuition changes) and external factors (e.g., changing state contributions, public health, and demographic changes).
Rolling forecasts are a management tool that enables institutions to continuously plan (i.e., forecast) over a set time horizon vs. a calendar or fiscal year. For example, in a 12-month forecast period, as each month ends, another month will be added. In other words, you’re always forecasting 12 months into the future.
Best practice is to ensure rolling forecasts can extend (e.g., roll) beyond the current calendar or fiscal year-end. Most commonly, rolling forecasts contain a minimum of 12 forecast periods but can also include 18, 24, or more periods depending on the needs and complexity of the organization.
Why Rolling Forecasts Are Important for Higher Education
The ability to quickly make decisions and implement them with financial forecasting software in near real-time is critical for any institution to survive and thrive into the future. As discussed above, accuracy and relevancy, as it relates to the context of time, are both important. And rolling forecasts enhance both. You’ll see improvements in accuracy, and you’ll deliver faster – improving relevancy.
Need some proof? Figure 2, a chart from Aberdeen’s “You Can’t Afford to be Static: Rolling with the Punches in Forecasting” report is full of some pretty amazing results. Here are the 3 that stand out the most:
- 14% increase in forecast accuracy
- 33% decrease in preparation time
- 300% improvement in productivity
OneStream Unifies Rolling Forecasts with Actuals Across the Enterprise
So how do you do it? How do you get started or move faster toward the adoption of effective rolling forecasts? How do you unify the past while looking to the future? Well, the multi-level approach that lets you do all of that is exactly what OneStream was designed to do.
Our Intelligent Finance Platform consolidates and pre-populates rolling forecasts with actuals the moment that the actuals have been certified. And there you go – you’ve now got a simultaneous view of the past that’s in the moment while looking to the future. OneStream even dynamically updates standard reports using the most current forecast. This functionality drastically cuts down the time and energy that your FP&A team will need to spend generating reports, making it much easier to iteratively forecast.
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As your team begins its rolling forecast journey toward organizational agility, data relevance, and trust, download our Unify Connected Planning Whitepaper to learn more. And if you’re ready to make the leap from static planning to agile forecasting, contact OneStream today!
The health of any multifaceted organization depends on multiple teams working in unison, with several sources of data in real-time. In this post, we’ll take a quick look at how the right technology can boost your team’s ability to collaborate quickly and accurately – all through the lens of higher ed budgeting and planning software.
There’s nothing simple about budgeting and planning in higher education. It’s a matrix. How, exactly? Well, simply put, there are just too many moving parts, too many external variables, and too many stakeholders for these two foundational activities to be linear. As today’s increasing pace of change places ever more pressure on Finance teams, many are taking steps to modernize their static budgeting and planning cycles.
Successful Planning and Budgeting Depends on Massive Collaboration
You’d be hard-pressed to find a regent, president, provost, dean, or any other higher-ed leader who didn’t list collaboration as a core value. Educational institutions have an inherent interdependence and must have all their organizational units in sync, working together, to accomplish large goals (see Figure 1). For that reason, access to and collaboration with quality data is imperative at every level of the organization.
Figure 1: The Importance of Data Sharing and Collaboration Source: HBR Analytic Services, 2020
The collaboration gap in budgeting and planning often begins and ends with the segregated nature of internal systems and, more importantly, how those systems share data and edits. Any team emailing around versions of spreadsheets and documents with edits and notes knows this pain all too well.
If those teams are printing hard copies and editing with sticky notes – a practice that’s still surprisingly common – then that pain may even be worse. Essentially, working separately and consolidating along the way creates openings for errors and destroys any hope for a quick, accurate turnaround.
Manual Processes Producing Static Budgets and Plans Don’t Work Anymore
Spreadsheets aren’t equipped to handle the multiple layers of work happening within the flurry of activity known as budgeting and planning in higher ed.
Figure 2: Problems Caused by Spreadsheet Collaboration Reach Far and Wide Source: MarketWatch, “88% of spreadsheets have errors”
In fact, budgeting and planning teams are expected to turn edits, integrate new data and structures, keep up to date, and communicate more clearly than ever before. Here are just a few of the top challenges that bog down budgeting and planning efforts when they’re rooted in manual updates through spreadsheets:
- No Version Control. Have you ever been working on a big project where your teammates sent you multiple emails with an attachment that had the same name? Did you know which one you were supposed to use, without wasting time looking back through the entire chain of exchanges?
- No Audit Trail. When you’re exchanging files, how do you remember who changed what? Do you remember when they changed it?
- Too Many Errors. Have you been tasked with preparing the final output? While you were re-typing edits from the separate notes and spreadsheets into the final output (was that really the “final”… or “final2″…), did you accidentally mistype a number? We’ve all been there, and we’ve all spent hours scouring the source sheets to find the correct entry. Worse yet, what if you missed the error altogether, and the final output is incorrect when it’s delivered to leadership?
- Slow Turnaround. Everyone hates deadlines, but speed is important when you’re making strategic decisions. Have you ever pushed to deliver on time, finished your work, and only later learned that leadership was disappointed that the output you delivered was out of date compared to the information they just heard on the news or read about in a legislative update? If your knowledge and data can’t update in real-time to your outputs, how can you be sure you’re making good decisions?
The hidden costs of spreadsheets are created by duplication of effort, errors, and rework. All this wasted time moves your team’s focus away from the true value of analysis and communication that supports strong decision-making across the institution and keeps everyone stuck in busywork.
As the pace of change continues to increase, higher ed Finance teams need to shift focus away from data gathering, reconciling, and managing key integration points and into collaborating with decision-makers and providing better, faster insights.
Moving Forward with Confidence
At OneStream, we understand that complexity is the inevitable by-product of change, especially in higher ed. Accordingly, we believe that your success will not be realized by eliminating complexity but will instead be achieved by effectively steering your institution through it.
How do we do it? Our unified Intelligent Finance platform (see Figure 3) allows us to deliver our many capabilities within a single, extensible, cloud-based application built to scale along with your organization. That’s why hundreds of organizations, including many higher ed institutions, have chosen OneStream – and they’ve never looked back.
Why is unification important? Well, it eliminates openings for errors created by manual work and separate, connected financial reporting tools. If you re-type data or are dependent on technical connection points for updates, you have opened the door for potential problems.
What can a platform approach do for you and your team? Here are a few of the key benefits you get with OneStream’s budgeting and planning software:
- Improved collaboration as all teammates have access to the data they need and can clearly communicate edits, additions, and corrections.
- Increased trust as the team works from a single source of truth updated in real-time. · Increased accuracy as the data automatically updates across all planning forms, visualizations, and dashboards.
- Increased consistency as the platform provides flexibility but also holds true to administrative structures.
- Reduced delivery time on final outputs.
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Need some proof? How about a great example from one of the nation’s top 10 public research universities? This case study details how OneStream has helped reduce the time needed to complete budgets and has detailed ROIs, including how a regular existing 3.5 hour-process was reduced to just 5 minutes.
Want to continue the discussion? Have any questions? Contact us, and one of our experts will reach out to you ASAP.
Budgeting, Accounting, and Finance teams in higher education, just like in other fields, must adapt and thrive in the face of rapid change. In this blog series, we’ll uncover the key value drivers that modern budgeting and planning software has to offer higher-ed leaders. We’ll also map out how these leaders can begin or accelerate the journey to conquering complexity and empowering their teams to lead at speed.
Speed and Agility Are More Important Than Ever
While accuracy, transparency, and consistency are the backbone of accounting and financial operations, adding speed and agility is what ultimately separates the institutions that deliver consistent value from those that struggle.
And as the two-year mark of the COVID-19 pandemic flies by, speed and agility have never been more important for leaders in higher education.
These leaders have been repeatedly forced to adjust daily operations. But they now face another obstacle: reconciling visions, plans, and budgets with a historic disruption that has created dips in enrollment, leading to a critical loss in revenue (see Figure 1).
Chart: Natalie Schwartz/Higher Ed Drive, Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
Those revenue losses naturally put pressure on the Finance team. And while pressure is nothing new to financial leaders in higher ed, COVID-19 and its complexities have undermined many institutions to the point where they’re no longer trying to balance budgets through cuts and efficiencies. Instead, schools must rethink and restructure their business models.
Board members, presidents, and deans – all of whom carry huge responsibilities – are thus demanding more consistent and timely data inform their decisions.
Accounting and Finance teams must therefore modernize to streamline processes, unify outputs and empower leadership with the information needed to not only make key decisions but also pivot when necessary. After all, the total economic and operational impacts of the pandemic are not yet known, but one thing is certain: complexity and the rapid pace of change are the new normal.
What’s on the Way in This Blog Series
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be laying out why higher-ed leaders need a modern, platform-based approach to planning, budgeting, and forecasting. We’ll also cover how to speed reporting and analysis cycles – and we’ll lay out the roadmap to show you how to make that a reality.
Below is a breakdown of the topics and related challenges we’ll cover along the way:
- Budgeting- Does your annual budget process take too long due to manual data integration with core systems and an over-reliance on spreadsheets for modeling? Even after all that effort, do you lack visibility into the funding sources across the organization? If you’re relying on outdated systems and processes, it makes aligning financial plans to strategic goals difficult. Why? Well, focusing on institutional priorities requires precision – and precision is a key benefit that enterprise performance management software brings to the table.
- Long Range Planning/Forecasting– Does your long-range planning process produce stagnant documents that are often out of date before the end of the first quarter? With so many moving pieces, state funding sources, research, endowments, ever-rising costs, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to keep your plan and your forecasts relevant. Predictive analytics and forecasting solve that dilemma.
- Reporting/Analysis (Signaling)– Traditionally, reporting has been used to monitor and communicate progress toward the goals and priorities outlined in plans and budgets – so reporting has historically only looked backward. Moving forward, we want to enhance the reporting function. To empower leaders to receive and quickly understand financial and operational positions. To give leaders the data and insights needed to pivot when and where it’s necessary to course correct or take advantage of opportunities. Financial signaling makes it all happen.
The Better Alternative – A Unified Platform
OneStream has empowered hundreds of organizations (including dozens in the public sector) to unleash the power of Accounting and Finance by unifying planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analytics through a single, extensible solution (see Figure 2). This solution is delivered via a cloud platform designed to evolve and scale with your institution.
Why should you care? Well, here are just a few of the key benefits you get with OneStream’s budgeting and planning software:
- Analyze alternative what-if scenarios and funding options on key liquidity, debt covenants, capital structure, and more.
- Simplify the entry of planning revisions with dynamic web forms or the comfort of Excel to instantly create or update plans or forecasts.
- Unify granular operational plans with financial goals with over 50 OneStream MarketPlaceTM solutions (e.g., People Planning, Capital Planning, Cash Planning, and Thing Planning).
- Administer, create and maintain predictive models without technical or data science expertise.
- Create signals and insights on daily and weekly working capital, controllable costs, enrollments, and other KPIs.
- Automate monthly financial reporting packages using MS PowerPoint® and Excel® integration.
- Maintain audit trails and data quality control checks.
Let’s Connect and Continue the Discussion
While you may not yet be a customer, we appreciate your work in the public sector and value your opinion – and we’d love to explore opportunities where we can move forward together. At OneStream, our mission is simple: “Every customer is a reference, one success at a time.”
For more information, download the Higher Education Solution Brief. Want to continue the discussion? Have any questions? Contact us, and one of our experts will reach out to you ASAP.
COVID-19 is impacting almost every individual and organization across the globe. And while we are several months into the pandemic, there are still so many unanswered questions. Will our largest population zones revert back to shelter-in-place restrictions? Should we really anticipate up to three-fold increases in remote work as Hackett’s Finance 2020 research suggests? And when will consumer demand and supply chain activity return to pre-COVID levels, if ever?
State and local government and education (SLED) and public higher education face the same questions as their private sector brethren. How so? Because existing annual or biennial budgets no longer reflect the economic environment under COVID. The impact and uncertainty from COVID are bringing many questions about these organizations’ funding sources considering the variability in macroeconomic conditions. Why? Because public higher education operating budgets receive anywhere from 15%-40% of their funding from state and federal funds. And with uncertainty permeating across federal, state and local agencies, the challenge for leaders within higher education to focus on structural classroom changes is becoming increasingly difficult. State and local governments face similar pressures too, as 50-60% of their tax receipts (e.g. sales and property tax) are typically generated from the retail and other tax generating industries which have been decimated throughout the pandemic.
Finance leaders must increasingly navigate the interconnected challenges of organizational complexity. To drive performance, they must execute critical processes with efficiency and support decision-making across the enterprise with timely access to financial and operating results.
And now, suddenly, Finance teams must also adapt and respond to the unprecedented increase in the demand for remote operation spurred by COVID-19. It’s now more critical than ever for them to drive efficiency in financial processes. But success in this complex environment hinges on having sophisticated collaboration and process management capabilities.