Project

User-centred financial management services (completed)

Goals

Project completed

The new Financial Regulation (FE) shall support the process of implementing the university’s strategic plan and contribute to the achievement of strategic goals and increase the competitiveness of the university.
The implementation of activity-based costing to monitor the university’s budgeting and budget implementation ensures greater transparency in the use of financial resources and allows to answer the question: how much money is spent at the university on teaching and learning activities, research and development, community service and related sub-activities?
The Finance Office started developing the project reporting environment in 2019/2020 and it is planned to be implemented in 2021, to streamline the current reporting of project costs and revenues in Excel spreadsheets and enable research groups to get an up-to-date overview of project reports.
Excel spreadsheets were used for planning the university’s budget and budget strategy, but in 2020 the Finance Office implemented a pilot solution – special budgeting software was introduced at the university to plan the 2021 budget. In the course of the pilot, new needs for development emerged, which will be solved as small development tasks in 2021 to continue the implementation and development of the introduced budgeting software to solve the development needs mapped during the pilot.
Co-contribution to the ALPHA project led by STRB. The main objective of the Finance Office is to develop and improve the overall financial management process. The sub-objectives are (a) high-quality budgeting input data; b) activity- based budgeting and activity-based budgeting reporting have been agreed and implemented at the university; c) the information systems, which are necessary to organize the university’s economic activities, enable the exchange of data to ensure the one-time recording and are integrated through the data warehouse (NAV software, FITEKIN purchasing invoice centre, PlanPro budgeting module, project module), and by using PowerBI solutions, data/reporting can be visualized in a user-friendly way.

Project benefits

The benefits of the new Financial regulations (FE) for the university and stakeholders are the implementation of a clearer and more motivating funding model, which will contribute to achieving the goals set in the university's strategic plan.
The main benefit of activity-based budgeting and the implementation of the activity-based budget is an increase in the transparency of the use of funds, which enables answering questions about the financial resources that are spent at the university on teaching and learning activities, research, entrepreneurship and serving society. When transparency has been achieved, it is possible to start asking why so much money is being spent on one activity or another and to identify the ways of making activities and processes more efficient.
The benefit of introducing a project module is that research teams, but also, for example, the Research Administration Office can get interim reports and overviews of project revenues and expenditures much more quickly and independently. Currently, quarter-end revenue accrual is applied, and the new solution would speed up this process and enable us to introduce monthly accruals, which in turn would speed up and improve the availability of project financial reviews.
The budgeting module allows us to give up a large number of Excel spreadsheets and perform budgeting uniformly throughout the university.
Improving the financial management process will help the university employees’ to better understand the processes related to accounting, data quality will improve, reporting will speed up, cost management will become more transparent and processes more efficient, and overall internal customer satisfaction will increase.

Regulations

Results and deadlines

The project management module has been put into use and its further developments have taken place in 2022/2023, including In 2023, end-user reporting from the module will also be created, and revenue accounting for most projects will be automated on an ongoing basis.	2023
Budgeting was transferred from Excel to PlanPro 2021 and from there back to Excel 2022	2022
In terms of financial information systems, additional PowerBI reports have been created for users to improve the financial management capabilities of units: [sales] tuition, sales invoices and debtors reports; [labor costs] reports of wages paid; [budget] financial sources, budget execution, general ledger reports;