This document discusses budgeting software alternatives to Excel for universities. It provides an overview of Hyperion Planning, which Stanford University uses to facilitate budget entry, monitoring, reforecasting, and reporting. Key benefits include consolidated access to data, built-in reporting capabilities, and the ability to perform "what-if" analyses. The document also briefly outlines other budgeting software options for smaller or larger implementations from vendors such as Alight Planning, Prophix, and Adaptive Planning.
3. Excel: A Necessary Evil
Universally used
Very flexible
Uncontrollable
A nightmare to “consolidate”
Distributed files; no version control
Excel will probably never be fully out of
the equation
Users will always want to export/import
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4. What should a budget system do?
Salary planning across cost centers
Annotation/line-item detail
Consolidation & distribution
Easy to add additional units, cost
centers, natural classifications
Be able to tag data with attributes (e.g. fund
type, level of restriction)
Be able to report dynamically in rows and
columns
Be able to handle Fund Accounting
Ability to do “what-if?” analysis
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6. A Case Study
How Stanford has used Oracle’s Hyperion
Planning for six years for budget
formulation, reforecasting, monitoring, an
d variance analysis
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7. Overview
Using Hyperion Planning, Stanford has
brought discipline and analytical ability to
its on-going budget monitoring and
reforecasting processes with more utility
and less pain than using Excel
We have a process that facilitates financial
information flow and analysis up and
down the decision-making hierarchy
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8. Budgeting at Stanford
$4.0B in Revenues and Expense
~30 decentralized budget units
~350 end users
>50k cost centers; >10k employees
Fund Accounting standards
High-level forecasting several
months before detailed budget
exercise
“Top-down” and “Bottom-up”
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9. How are funds budgeted?
OB Designated
Grants &
Contracts
Auxiliary Service
Center Endowed
University
UR Gifts
Detailed Budgets, usually to “Pooled” budgets at
Budgeted at combination of department and fund
specific cost center and
specific CC and “Pools” at type level, at detailed
natural account level, and
department and fund type codes
position level
level, at detailed codes
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11. Concepts/Rationale
Hyperion is an excellent tool for analysis of
summarized data
Generates fast results for known retrieval patterns
Consolidation of all units is easy
Instant access to data submitted
Don’t have to wait for linking of spreadsheets
Good roll-up and drill-through capability
“Slicing & dicing” capabilities beyond those of Excel
We design standard reports and data entry
forms/templates for all the units to use
It facilitates on-going reforecasting and analysis of
trends
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12. Organization of the Data
Aggregate data is entered and stored
in the system by:
Budget Unit
Fund Type
Year
Scenario (e.g. Budget Plan, Booked
Budget)
Version (Bottom-up, Top-down)
Budget Category (revenue & expense)
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14. Budget Entry Portal Screen: Table of Contents
We have organized forms
into “like” types of data for
all of the cost centers for
which someone is
responsible
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15. Budget Entry: Non-Salary
Using Cell Text
to make notes
Data can be
exported to Excel
Using Supporting Detail, users
can annotate a particular entry
or build up a calculation such
as cost per person times
number of people
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16. Budget Entry: Salary Percent Distribution
Salaries are calculated using $
times % charged to each cost
center
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17. Consolidation & Distribution
The system has an
organizational
outline/hierarchy
that facilitates drill-
down and drill-up
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20. Budget Analysis & Reporting using Hyperion: “slicing & dicing”
Using the Point of View, users can
change the data the report is looking at
Related Content (“links”) let you drill
down to lower levels of detail directly
from this report
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21. Variance Analysis & Reforecasting Process
Stored within Hyperion:
High-level Budget Plan
9/1 Consolidated Budget (12 months of data from
Budget cycle)
Year-end Projection
Actuals (e.g. Sep ~ Mar of Actuals from Oracle)
Goals:
To identify and analyze variances from budget
To enable complex “slicing & dicing” of budget
and actuals data
To create a Rolling Forecast (Sep ~ Mar Actuals +
Apr ~ Aug Budget) with capability to adjust
remaining budget numbers
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22. Rube Goldberg’s Pencil Sharpener
Open window (A) and fly kite (B). String (C) lifts small door (D) allowing moths (E) to escape
and eat red flannel shirt (F). As weight of shirt becomes less, shoe (G) steps on switch (H)
which heats electric iron (I) and burns hole in pants (J). Smoke (K) enters hole in tree
(L), smoking out opossum (M) which jumps into basket (N), pulling rope (O) and lifting cage
(P), allowing woodpecker (Q) to chew wood from pencil (R), exposing lead. Emergency knife
(S) is always handy in case opossum or the woodpecker gets sick and can't work
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23. Previous Variance Analysis Process
Bus
Oracle Objects
Star Schema
(Actuals) Query
Bus
Objects
Collection
Hyperion
(Budgets) Star Schema
Excel
DSS
Data Warehouse
UBO reviewed each Units emailed Excel
SS and then loaded Analysis by Units Visual
SS to UBO Basic
into Hyperion
Macro
Variance Report Spreadsheets
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24. The budget monitoring process using Hyperion
Hyperion BI+
Oracle
EDW / Business
(Actuals)
Objects
UBO enters
“top-down”
forecast/budget Hyperion
into Hyperion
Analysis Since Hyperion will
Units enter their by Units only hold data at a
analysis/forecasts certain level of
into Hyperion detail, transactional
reporting
Ad-hoc environment
Budget, Variance, analysis & provides queries for
& Reforecast reporting analysis when more
Reports (printed & detail is needed
on-line)
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35. Reports to aid in reforecasting
“Run-rate” Report: How much of last year’s total expense did the first 4 months
represent?
The user can use this to help project out the current year.
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36. What we have gained: the benefits
A web-based budget formulation and reporting system
Accessible from home/wherever
A dynamic, yet controlled, system
Better control over integrity of metadata
“Real-time” access to budget entry progress
Much greater ability to monitor the budget along the way
Better budget process management
Greater flexibility in report design
Better ability to report on Consolidated Budget
No software overhead on user machines
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37. “The Fine Print”
Scalability is always at the forefront
We have to manage the system around the large number of
cost centers and positions we budget to
We have multiple databases (“applications”) which keep
performance optimal
Storing low-level detail for units must be spread across several
applications, and high level information for all units must be
consolidated into one application
Significant infrastructure and IT support needs
Although the management and setup of the system is in our
control
Windows-based: IE 6/7 or Firefox 2
Mac users need dual-boot Intel machines
The tool will not address skill issues
We still have fundamental issues around training non-financial
people to do financial work
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38. Leveraging the Tool
Our Land & Buildings division has developed an application to
calculate and forecast out charge-out rates
Developed by an analyst who moved over from my department
We are developing an application that will allow units to forecast
out endowment principal growth and payout, using the university’s
central assumptions and adding their own projections of new
gifts, liquidations, and variations from our central assumptions
We are implementing Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Management for
external financial statement reporting
We hope to develop integrations between fund accounting based-
budgets and GAAP-based financial statements
We are working on developing high-level long-range forecasting
models using Oracle’s Hyperion Strategic Finance
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47. Prophix Software
Higher Ed Clients include:
Wayne State University
Golden Gate University
Lincoln Educational Services
The Jewish Theological Seminary
http://www.prophix.com/customers/industry/education/
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