Financial Budgeting, Planning and Management Software Solution

The Vendor is required to provide financial budgeting, planning and management software solution must robust, secure, and user-friendly functionality that supports strategic decision making, enhances operational efficiency, and aligns financial planning with institutional goals.
- Requirement:
1. Budgeting and forecasting
•    Deliver a budgeting platform with built-in workflows to support approval processes, task assignments, and notifications. 
•    Utilize existing chart of accounts and trees from the university’s system to build bottom-up models, plans and budgets. 
•    Forecast future years of financial performance based on previous actual results and current and working budgets. 
•    Provide role-based security to ensure appropriate access to budget data and functionality. 
•    Enable the automation of budgeting processes, reducing reliance on manual spreadsheets. 
•    Ability to integrate budget automation, workflow, short- and long-range financial planning, and financial reporting in one solution. 
•    Enable forecasts based on actual trends and user defined assumptions. 
•    Ability to create assumption sheet and guidelines to develop multi-year forecasts. 
•    Provide performance to ensure iterative “what if” analysis results are quickly accessible even when scenarios are performed on large data sets. 
•    Provide user-friendly input functionality for department budget specialists, deans, division chairs, and vice chancellors. 
•    Facilitate collaboration across departments, enabling decentralized budget entry with centralized oversight. 
•    Operating and capital budgeting capabilities. 
•    Line-item detail and account-level tracking
•    Ability to create and manage multiple budget versions (original, revised, forecasted). 
•    Ability to adjust assumptions and variables institution-wide. 
•    Scenario modeling and multi-year forecasting (minimum six (6) years). 
•    Integration with historical actuals for trend and variance analysis.
2. Reporting and analytics
•    Integrate financial, general ledger, and human resources data for a comprehensive view of institutional finances.
•    Capable of developing a full range of financial reports, including statement of activities, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows
•    Provide delivery system for reports and the ability to “push” reports to specified users on a scheduled or as-needed basis. 
•    Support real-time or near real-time data refreshes to improve decision-making. 
•    Reporting capabilities for budget-to-actuals, summaries, and variance analysis
•    Ability to easily drill down through reports to source data. 
•    Workflow management capabilities. 
•    Provide dashboards and visualizations that promote transparency and accessibility of financial data. 
•    Ability to generate reports by fund, organization, and account hierarchy
•    Enable end-user visibility to budget status, expenditure activity, and other, user defined “dashboard” metrics. 
•    Streamline financial reporting to reduce manual data compilation and support compliance requirements.
3. Strategic financial planning
•    Provide tools for multi-scenario financial modeling and develop mid- and long-term financial plans that are stress tested to align plans with strategic priorities. 
•    Provide capability to track multiple “what-if” scenarios with reports available to compare differences, including parameter differences. 
•    Enable the creation of driver-based models for revenue and expense forecasting. 
•    Support GAAP-based financial statement development. 
•    Calculate and display the composite financial index (CFI) to assess financial health. 
•    Deliver executive-level dashboards to communicate long-term financial plans and key performance indicators. 
•    Model effects of changing internal assumptions, and mix and match assumptions and initiatives to compare different scenarios. 
•    Ability to manage multiple scenarios and conduct “what if” analysis.
4. Tuition revenue planning
•    Align tuition and fee data to create accurate tuition and revenue projections.
•    Model the financial impact of variables such as enrollment changes, tuition rates, discount rates, and the introduction of new programs. 
•    Enable scenario analysis to understand the sensitivity of revenue to multiple factors. 
•    Provide dashboards to communicate projections to stakeholders.
- Technical and integration requirements
•    Support secure data transfer protocols and comply with all applicable data privacy regulations.
•    Provide data integration with external sources or sub-models (e.g. General ledger, payroll system, excel, ethos).
•    Ensure system scalability and performance to support growth in users and data volume.
•    Cloud-based solution (SaaS).
•    Accessible from mobile devices.
•    System performance suitable for quarterly and year-end closing procedures.
•    Configurable data transformation and validation processes.
•    Secure user authentication and data encryption.
•    Web-based access with secure authentication and role-based permissions.
•    SOC 2 type ii compliance for any SaaS or hosted solution.
•    Support for single sign-on (SSO) preferred but not required.
•    Exportable data formats (excel, pdf, csv).
•    Support for importing and exporting data via excel and csv for select use cases.
•    Browser- and device-agnostic web interface.