Director of Business Systems Transforms Budgeting Process to Reduce Burden on Five Units (and Self)

Challenge

Kelly Husband was challenged with managing financials and budgeting for her department at a major university in Western Canada. As a user of Jet Analytics, she was already very familiar with Jet products and enjoyed the ease and simplicity of running her own reports. However, when budgeting time rolled around, she was faced with the same quarterly nightmare – how to manage the budgeting process for all seven of her cost centers in a timely, accurate fashion.

Kelly’s job was complex; part cost recovery and part core funding, she had to look at everything from a consolidated view but did not have any tools to do so. She was tasked with seeking input from six individual managers and pulling that information into Excel spreadsheets, all within an impossibly small window of time. The process did not allow for any real planning, and no adjustments could be made on the fly. It was highly stressful and required a lot of human interaction and hope to complete.  

“Our legacy budgeting solution was very complicated. I was unable to see consolidations until after the budgets were complete. There was no opportunity to do what-if scenarios or make on-the-fly adjustments. We were really held back. And I had two weeks to complete what felt like three months of work.” 

Solutions

After attending NAVUG, Kelly was hooked on the idea of Jet Budgets and immediately requested it for her Q3 budgeting period. Kelly was thrilled with how easy the solution was to implement, which expedited the approval process. Within a few days of implementation, Kelly was able to start using Jet Budgets and transformed the way the fiscal planning process ran.

She was able to drop her budget numbers into Jet Budgets quickly, send out individual portfolios to managers for their input, and then review consolidations before loading it back to her NAV system. With the budgets loaded, Kelly can see the consolidated view in both Jet Budgets and NAV and delegate updating the budget with actuals, so she can understand expenses vs. revenues and make tweaks and reallocate funding much easier.

“It’s brilliant! I knew I wanted it as soon as I heard about it. We’ve got more transparency into our spending and revenues, and it has actually put my mind at rest. The clerks update the numbers monthly. I no longer wait for the quarter to end and feel like I’m scrambling and running a marathon during budget season. It’s just done.”