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CHICAGO, July 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaufman Hall, a leading provider of enterprise performance management software, data and management consulting services, today unveiled its Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model for higher education institutions at the 2019 National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) Annual Meeting.

The new Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model provides higher education institutions with a framework that offers a complete perspective of strategic goals, as well as the resources available to meet those goals. It also outlines steps to assess an organization's progress in building a successful financial planning process, helping institutions create a roadmap for improvement.

"Higher education is lagging other industries when it comes to strategic financial planning," said Kermit Randa, CEO, Kaufman Hall Software. "Institutions often lack data, and industry processes for gathering information are disjointed and tend to focus on one-year operational budgets rather than multi-year, strategically-driven plans. The Kaufman Hall Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model helps higher education institutions develop a multi-year financial plan that aligns with mission-based strategies, while also making it easier to anticipate the future and adjust. Rather than focusing only on the upcoming budget year, this model gives organizations the information and tools they need to build a sustainable business model over the next five to 10 years."

According to a recent Kaufman Hall survey, only 18% of higher education finance professionals are very confident in their teams' ability to quickly and easily make adjustments to strategies and plans. Additionally, two-thirds said their current business models are unsustainable for the next 5-10 years.

The Kaufman Hall Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model for higher education addresses these issues by creating a four-stage process that replaces the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets many currently use for budgeting:

• Stage one, which is where most higher education institutions are today, focuses on operational needs for a single year. Budgeting typically occurs only once per year and is performed using spreadsheets.
• Stage two continues to focus on operational needs, but covers multiple years, with budget activities being evaluated two to three times per year. It also moves away from spreadsheets in favor of a unified enterprise performance management (EPM) solution that offers basic data integration from disparate sources and alignment of actual to budgeted data and formatted reports.
• Stage three covers multiple years with quarterly or even monthly budget reviews. It incorporates all funding sources, with integration of targets from long-range planning to budgets including target setting, direct data integration, financial dashboards, institution-wide scenarios and multiple hierarchies.
• Stage four, the highest level of maturity, is a strategic multi-year approach that reviews the budget on a continuous rather than scheduled basis, with fully automated reporting and planning that includes all of the previous improvements plus benchmarking, dynamic workflows/approvals, ad hoc reporting, operational dashboards, and more.

"Current operational budgets used by most higher education institutions make it difficult to see the big picture and make strategic financial decisions that will help them weather industry market shifts," Randa said. "Additionally, the manual processes they rely on are time-consuming, prone to human error, and make it difficult to connect real-time labor, tuition, and grants information from their external general ledger, student systems, and human resources systems, to their budgets. Implementing the Maturity Model framework will provide visibility into external drivers and the ability to model scenarios to make better, more-informed decisions impacting the long-term success of their institutions."

Kaufman Hall will demonstrate its new Strategic Financial Planning Maturity Model for higher education in Booth 313 at the NACUBO Annual Meeting, July 13-16 in Austin, Texas.

About Kaufman Hall

Kaufman Hall provides a unique combination of software, management consulting and data solutions to help society's foundational institutions to realize sustained success amid changing market conditions. Since 1985, Kaufman Hall has been a trusted advisor to boards and executive management teams, helping them incorporate proven methods, rigorous analytics and industry-leading solutions into their strategic planning and financial management processes, with a focus on achieving their most challenging goals.

Kaufman Hall services use a rigorous, disciplined, and structured approach that is based on the principles of corporate finance. The breadth and integration of Kaufman Hall advisory services are unparalleled, encompassing strategy; financial and capital planning; cost transformation; treasury and capital markets management; and mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and joint ventures.

Kaufman Hall software includes the Axiom Software Suite, providing sophisticated, flexible performance management solutions that empower finance professionals to analyze results, model the future, and optimize organizational decision making. Solutions for long-range planning, budgeting and forecasting, performance reporting, capital planning, and cost accounting deliver decision support, reporting, and analytics within an integrated software platform. Kaufman Hall's Clinical Analytics empower healthcare organizations with clinical benchmarks, data, and analytics to provide a higher quality of care for optimized performance and improved patient outcomes.

Press Contact:
Philip Anast
Amendola Communications (for Kaufman Hall)
Email: panast@acmarketingpr.com
Phone: 312-576-6990

SOURCE Kaufman Hall