Improve the Budget Culture

Wireless network connections are simply a natural extension of any household or corporate infrastructure. These connections have the potential to free us from our physical surroundings and continue our conversations and productivity regardless of a floor plan.

Now, imagine for a moment that if every time you needed to go online or make a phone call, you had to sit down at a desk and tether yourself to a network jack. 

That wouldn't fly anymore, would it? No. That is because in business and throughout society, we've moved beyond the need to remain stationary in order to harness a connection to the Internet, and we now communicate freely whenever and wherever we need to go.

 So why should Higher Education be immune to progress?

Using this analogy, why then do institutions continue to approach their budgeting in such an arcane manner? When the time comes to begin the budgeting process, every office requesting funds ends up passing around multiple versions of the same spreadsheet, emailing a copy of their edits to the Business Office, only to have another team consolidate each individual entry into a single, aggregated spreadsheet by hand? This process continues until each office has completed their budget. Once the institution's budget is ready for review by a larger audience, the process then repeats. It makes no sense! It may be one of the most inefficient practices in higher education today, and yet it's the same on the majority of campuses with whom we have worked.

Institutions need a new approach to one of its most critical business functions. In order to address mounting concerns over retention and focus more on student success and learning outcomes, schools must spend less time on the budgeting process and spend more time focusing on what matters most in higher education: its students.