Managing financial information is often a daunting challenge to financial officers and other education leaders who must demonstrate accountability and return on investment. In many institutions, financial and other administrative systems are housed in different departments, meaning that information cannot be readily shared. Data that is stored manually in spreadsheets or databases increases the likelihood of inaccuracies creeping into the financial reports provided to institutional leadership, auditors and the public. These financial systems make it difficult for public institutions to comply with the statements issued by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) that specify the contents of state-funded institutions’ financial statements. At public and private institutions alike, creating budget data or accounting for such assets as property, equipment and materials involve labor-intensive processes that can make even the simplest of questions seem impossible to answer.

K-12 striving for integrated financial insights
As K-12 leaders strive to bring together financial information from a variety of systems across a school district or local educational agency (LEA), they must also incorporate information from a state’s Department of Education. These leaders need to be able to view K-12 from every perspective - across schools, departments, districts, etc. Administrators are working to fully integrate financial management into their schools’ strategic planning, budgeting and mission evaluation processes to produce a clear statement of financial management goals and objectives, to drive operations, and to manage financial risk.

Colleges and universities facing steep financial expectations
Additionally, expectations about the way colleges and universities manage their finances have never been higher. As financial officers are pushed to deliver financial information to decision makers across their own campuses or to off-campus business partners and stakeholders, they face the difficult task of providing up-to-the-minute, secure and easy-to-use financial data and services. Online banking and financial services enjoyed individually by faculty, staff and students are expected to be replicated in similarly advanced levels of financial management across campus.

Can you turn financial information into financial intelligence?
SAS Financial Management is one component of SAS Financial Intelligence, a vision for financial performance management that includes solutions for financial management, activity-based management, dashboards and scorecarding and advanced analytics such as optimization and forecasting. By combining the hindsight, insight and foresight that these powerful solutions provide, education finance departments can build credibility through the accurate information they deliver and gain the confidence of other departments.

SAS Financial Management
With SAS Financial Management, education financial leaders can collate financial information from a variety of systems across their institutions, yielding timely and comprehensive results. Our solution facilitates regulatory compliance by integrating data management and financial intelligence with the finest online analytic processing in the industry. It allows you to view your institution from any perspective: department, school district, college, school, campus or others.

SAS Financial Management includes two integrated functional components:

• Planning - allows finance executives and other relevant finance department personnel to embed advanced SAS analytics into budgets and plans to forecast future operating results more accurately.
• Financial reporting - consolidates multidimensional information on demand while performing all financial calculations relevant to the reporting and planning processes, thereby enabling organizations to close their books more rapidly.

Benefits of financial management
With SAS Financial Management, financial officers and other education leaders will benefit from:

• Timely and accurate forecasts - Develop accurate plans and forecasts that can be updated easily in response to changing business and operational circumstances.
• Greater financial transparency - Create a more transparent environment for managing financial and operational data to produce timely, accurate and relevant reports. This transparency is achieved by extending control of information horizontally across the institution and vertically between transaction-oriented systems and the higher-level financial management system.
• Rapid report publishing - Reduce the time required to produce and publish financial reports. On-demand consolidations, which simultaneously incorporate any necessary currency conversions, eliminations, ownership adjustments and allocations, can reduce the time and cost of financial consolidations. As a result, you will be able to more easily comply with GASB reporting requirements, including GASB 34.
• The integrity of financial information - Maintain data integrity and security through the financial data mart that protects the data that supports intelligent decisions. Consolidate financial data from diverse sources systematically to avoid manual, thus error-prone, transcription.
• Financial performance management - Integrate performance management systems, such as scorecarding, financial consolidation, analysis and reporting, and budgeting.

SAS Activity-Based Management
SAS Activity-Based Management is the market-leading solution that gives education leaders the level of detail necessary to make accurate, insightful decisions that will improve financial performance. Unlike traditional accounting systems that are geared for external reporting, SAS Activity-Based Management provides accurate financial information in a form that mirrors the day-to-day activities of the people, equipment and processes that directly affect an institution’s bottom line.

Benefits of activity-based management
With SAS Activity-Based Management, you can:

• Determine the true contributors to - and detractors from - optimum financial performance.
• Accurately predict costs and resource requirements associated with changes in organizational structure and resource costs.
• Easily identify the root causes of poor financial performance.
• Track costs of activities and work processes.
• Give shared-service organizations, such as the IT department, a clear understanding of costs associated with internal customers, so budgets and service-level agreements can be more accurately determined.
• Equip education leaders with cost intelligence to drive improvements.