University’s Budget Process Optimization Drives Agility and Effective Decision Making

The challenge

This client, a university located in the midwestern United States, faced turnover within its budget office, resulting in resourcing gaps and disruptions to the annual budget process, which had stretched to seven months. Limited staff capacity and capability constraints hindered its ability to produce timely monthly reporting, as well as annual planning and budget oversight. To address these challenges, the client engaged Protiviti as a strategic partner to assume critical budget office functions and provide subject matter expertise in budgeting and reporting.

Based on the initial assessment performed, which included a review of existing budget models and supporting analyses, Protiviti identified these challenges:

• Lack of a defined budgeting processes and accompanying documentation, such as an annual budget calendar with clear responsibilities, dependencies, and timing, led to inconsistent execution and onboarding difficulties.
• Legacy processes were highly manual and lacked the efficiency and functionality required to manage the complexity of annual budget preparation. As a result, the client faced a growing backlog of routine budget activities and regularly experienced delays in achieving important milestones.
• Disconnected spreadsheets with hard-coded data required redundant data validation and extensive consolidation efforts, increasing the risk of errors and limited agility for scenario planning.
• Reporting financial data lacked a hierarchical structure, making it difficult to organize and consolidate reports, explain variances, and provide meaningful information to support strategic decision-making.
• The organization did not re-forecast after finalizing the annual budget, limiting its ability to adapt to changing financial and operational conditions and proactively manage resources throughout the year.
• Minimal collaboration between the budget office and functional departments led to misalignment, reduced budget ownership, and limited transparency and accountability.

With these challenges identified, the project team developed a future state roadmap to achieve a more efficient annual budget process, along with more timely and meaningful analytics to support routine reporting and a formal re-forecast process.

Optimizing the budget function

To address these organizational challenges and enhance budgeting processes, we collaborated closely with the university’s senior administration and budget owners to optimize, standardize, and streamline budgeting operations while successfully executing the annual budget cycle for the subsequent year.

• Integrated a team of skilled resources: Protiviti embedded a team to support routine budget operations, annual budget development, and strategic financial analysis to inform more effective, data-driven decisions.
• Established, implemented, and executed a formal annual budgeting process: A structured annual budget cycle was introduced, including building partnerships with departments, incorporating insightful analytics, and developing formal consolidated reporting, board materials, and motions required for budget approval.
• Developed a formal budget calendar for the annual budget cycle: A detailed budget calendar defined roles, responsibilities, dependencies, and timelines, providing clarity and structure for the newly hired budget team.
• Built a dynamic driver-based consolidated budget model: A driver-based, three-year consolidated financial model was built to support flexibility and scenario planning to align with the university’s strategic priorities and long-term objectives.
• Developed optimized and standardized templates: Optimized templates and checklists streamlined routine budget activities and ensured consistency and accuracy of budget deliverables.
• Conducted quarterly forecasts: Protiviti embedded a team to update financial projections based on actual results to enable more accurate planning, improved decision-making, and timely resource reallocation.
• Streamlined reporting processes: Standardized workbooks to reduce manual efforts and improve the speed and reliability of financial data and insights.

Unlocking future value

This transformation of the budget office unlocked significant future value for the university, including:

• An approximate 5% improvement in budget accuracy and data-driven insights derived from enhanced budget and reporting models focused on key metrics and business drivers.
• A faster and more effective annual budgeting process due to streamlined and optimized financial models, reducing manual efforts such as reconciliation and data validation activities. As a result, the university’s annual budget process was reduced by approximately one month.
• Greater fiscal accountability and adherence to plan through standardized reporting and budget template workbooks strengthened confidence in the financial results.
• Proactive identification of risks and opportunities in advance of the traditional planning cycle by implementing a quarterly forecasting process and scenario planning.
• Strengthened continuity, reduced redundancy, and facilitated on-boarding of Budget Office resources based on process documentation.

The university’s leadership team is now better equipped to make data-driven decisions, aligning financial planning with institutional goals, and focusing on high-impact initiatives that drive long-term strategic success.