Manhattanville College

The annual Ellucian Impact Award recognizes higher education institutions leveraging technology to alleviate and reduce administrative burdens, retain and grow top talent, and enable staff and faculty to succeed with best-in-class tools and insights.

A private liberal arts institution in Purchase, New York, Manhattanville College is one of the 2023 Impact Award winners. Their use of Ellucian Colleague expanded to include the Self-Service Finance Management Budget Development Module, facilitating streamlined processes for budget requests through a central location. Among other benefits, Colleague's Budget Development Module helped Manhattanville to uncover over $2M in cost savings while developing and reviewing its fiscal year 2023 budget.

The Challenge: Inefficient Processes Amid Financial Pressures

Like many institutions, Manhattanville College faced increasing financial pressure in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an age of "tightening belts," there was little cushion for surprise expenses and every budget request had to be clearly justified.

In prior years, Manhattanville managed its budget request and development process outside Ellucian Colleague. The budget office would email Excel spreadsheets to departmental budget administrators to enter their requests and return as copies. These spreadsheets were then compiled into a master document to upload into the ERP.

Not only was this process inefficient, but it was also prone to data input errors and did not allow for clear prior-year comparisons. And as the budget review was conducted by sharing these files back and forth, more opportunities for over—or understating budgets arose.

To offset the effects of these inefficiencies, Manhattanville became increasingly flexible with its budget request and development timeframe. As a result, the budget office couldn’t compile the information into a final budget in time for the start of the fiscal year in July. Most years, the budget wasn’t uploaded until September.

On top of all these challenges and the urgent need to transform budgeting processes, Manhattanville’s Board of Directors only approved the use of the first quarter’s allotted funds upon reviewing the Fiscal Year 2023 Budget. This was a unique and unprecedented request meant to eliminate expenses while the college searched for additional cost savings. Essentially, Manhattanville needed a solution to “hold back” a portion of the budgets in the system from departmental use to stay within the Board’s intended timeframe.

The Solutions: Streamlined Budgeting and Forecasting

Manhattanville found its solution in a system it already had: Ellucian Colleague’s Budget Development Module. To accommodate the Board's request and ensure the college did not spend its budget too quickly, Manhattanville used the module in an innovative new way to place an encumbrance of 75% on all non-salary lines. With this encumbrance in place, departmental budget administrators only had access to 25% of their budget in the Self-Service Finance Management Budget Development Module, giving Manhattanville enough time to implement other cost-saving transformations.

With the Budget Development Module, Manhattanville has streamlined its budget request and development processes by hosting all necessary information in one user-friendly location with intuitive, role-based access. Now, all departmental budget administrators are using the same tool and formatting, while adhering to a single timeline. Information can also be seen as soon as the data is entered, eliminating previous delays. As a result, the budget office can pull data, build reports, and analyze information significantly faster than before.

Filling Gaps and Reducing Errors

Previously, the budget office struggled to account for all expenses during the annual budget development process as they often received late or incomplete requests from other departments. Now, the office can close the Budget Development Module to departmental users at a set date and time, allowing them to reinforce necessary deadlines. Additionally, the ability to compare current to past budget requests has enabled the budget office to catch large unbudgeted items that may have been overlooked by their respective departments. These are the types of oversights that previously resulted in the large, "surprise," unbudgeted expenses that would cause problems after the start of the year.

With all the information accounted for, the office can deliver timely, accurate budgets. In Fiscal Year 2022, uploading Manhattanville's operating budget took several days. The most time-consuming part of this process was troubleshooting information errors, which spanned over 2,000 lines of data. In 2023, uploading the new fiscal year operating base budget into Colleague took no more than 20 minutes without any errors.

Data as the Key to Unlock New Savings

The Budget Development Module also provided a straightforward and efficient way to implement what’s called “zero-based budgeting” for the first time. Given easy access to all the necessary information, including prior year-to-date actuals, departmental budget administrators can easily make data-backed requests with detailed justifications. With more granular information, the budget office can efficiently validate the need, confirm calculations, and keep requests within the overarching budget parameters for the fiscal year, while also isolating trends to identify savings opportunities.

This level of analysis has enabled the use of data in guiding policy improvements. For example, Manhattanville identified several funding requests to purchase items already provided by the institution, such as software. Isolating one such duplicated expense resulted in a savings of over $175,000. In total, Manhattanville’s implementation of zero-based budgeting has uncovered over $2 million in cost savings while developing and reviewing the Fiscal Year 2023 budget.

And unlike previous years, that budget wasn’t delivered months after the fiscal year start date. Instead, Manhattanville had their budget in place by July, setting them up to stay on schedule for the rest of the fiscal year.

Looking Ahead

With Ellucian Colleague’s Budget Development Module, Manhattanville College has streamlined its budget request and development processes, helping the institution stay on track and within forecasts. With unified information, improved data accuracy and visibility into prior-year comparisons, and enforceable deadlines, the budget office can better ensure every institutional dollar is being used effectively to meet student needs. By embracing a new module in their existing system, Manhattanville College has the tools they need to improve financial outcomes every fiscal year.