Broward College streamlines accounting processes with SAS^®

With eight campuses spread across one of South Florida's most heavily populated counties, Broward College boasts "a location for every education." With every location comes a separate budget. And each budget rolls up into a single collegewide spending plan that could easily stand an unwieldy 2 feet tall. Using SAS, however, Broward officials have access to financial reporting without all the paper.

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Patti Barney 
Vice President, Information Technology

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To continue growing its student ranks and educating more of the population, Broward College must continually prove its financial requirements to its board of trustees and to the state.

But Broward used to struggle with financial reporting. Users had to access mainframe reports and cut and paste that information into Excel. The process would take several days – sometimes weeks – to compile the information. And the overall process was cumbersome and lent itself to inaccuracies.

SAS helps Broward's staff monitor financial reports, analyze operational effectiveness and generate their own ad hoc reports. And because it is a multicampus institution, it needs to report data at the college level as well as by campus and further down through each department and cost center.

"The primary objective for simplifying the way we prepare financial reports was to reduce the effort required to perform the monthly, quarterly and annual reporting," says Patti Barney, Vice President of Information Technology. "It also gives financial analysts the ability to analyze the results in a timely manner."

Fact-based decision making
The most immediate need was to provide financial reports that would help meet state requirements for additional revenue. Also, the college's board of trustees was tired of viewing antiquated monthly financial summaries. Instead, they wanted easy-to-read charts and graphs.

"In the long term, we want fact-based decision making," Barney says. "We plan to have one portal that provides all the information about the financial health of the institution and what it's going to take to hire new instructors to meet the demands of a growing curriculum and who we're going to need to hire to replace retiring staff."

Having quick and easy access to financial reporting empowers analysts and executive staff to make smart decisions based on reality – not assumptions. "Having SAS allows us to make fact-based decisions," says Liz Mendez, Associate Vice President for Budget and Payroll. "And I am sure our college's president is confident in the data he's quoting to the board of trustees because the data is coming from SAS intelligence that he got from his desktop. That's got to be very rewarding to him."

Quick, easy access to financial reports
Before implementing SAS, the college had a transaction-based ERP system that lacked both data manipulation techniques and real reporting capabilities. "After two prior unsuccessful projects, we turned to SAS and found that it was easy to develop with the help of its technical support and consulting teams," Mendez says. "With the other projects we had previously tried, we had no one sitting behind the product telling us how to make it work."

Now the data automatically flows from the college's ERP system into SAS, and each campus has access to reports that, with the click of a mouse, show them their budget-to-actual summary for the day. "If they want to see the total budget numbers for the entire college, they can," Mendez says. "If they want to compare themselves to another campus, they can do that, too.

"In the old days, we would have to do a bunch of 'print screens' out of the ERP system and have someone compile it into a spreadsheet and manipulate the data. Now, with SAS, it's just – boom! – here it is."

At a glance
With SAS, Broward College is able to:

• Handle campuswide self-service reporting.
• Drill down and perform detailed transactional analysis.
• Generate different views for various levels at the college.
• Monitor and publish financial and nonfinancial metrics.
• Predict future annual and quarterly financial requirements.
• Monitor data on year-to-year spending in order to budget better and more strategically.
• Easily and accurately track how money is being spent.
  

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