XLerant

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013 - XLerant knows edu Budgeting.  We have dozens of higher education institutions that have converted from the cumbersome process of Excel-based budgeting.  Get out of Excel jail.

Join us Wednesday, June 12th, 2013, 2:00- 3:00 EST, to learn the 21 reasons why XLerant is a perfect fit for your higher education budgeting process.  Learn why Fisher College, The Sage Colleges, Marietta College, Lake Superior State University, A.T. Still, Carroll College, The Rhode Island School of Design and many more higher education institutions have dramatically improved budgeting using XLerant.

To learn more about XLerant and higher education, visit www.xlerant.com/weknowedu

"XLerant's BudgetPak was the best purchase decision we ever made. Our budgeting process now runs smoothly and we get the best of user flexibility and financial controls. We don't have to make any difficult tradeoffs."  - Cheryl Warner, Director of Budgets, Northwood University [ more ]

Last year, XLerant was featured in Business Officer Magazine in an article titled "Self Service Budgeting". The article does a wonderful job of highlighting the challenges Drew University experienced with Excel based budgeting, and how the University partnered with XLerant to address them. [ more ]

Case Studies

"We found XLerant, did a product evaluation, built the business case, and went live in a two-month time period." - Curt DeFriez, Controller [ more ]

"It is hard to get a budget spreadsheet that you can have total reliability and total confidence in.  But budgeting is mission critical in today's higher education world."  - Rob Rood, AVP Finance [ more ]

"I needed something that bridged the gap on user experience.  When personnel have a difficult time using the budget technology it is very difficult for them to budget accurately." - Steve Rich, Vice President of Finance [ more ]

"XLerant helped us deal with the "new normal" of reduced funding. We needed to cope with financial sustainability with resource shortages. XLerant helps us create a culture of accountability to support that new normal." - Howard Buxbaum, VP Finance and Business Affairs.  "The budget should be a numerical expression of the strategic plan. XLerant allows us to readily and automatically do that." - Chris Van Wyk, AVP Finance [ more ]

"XLerant's BudgetPak was the best purchase decision we ever made. Our budgeting process now runs smoothly and we get the best of user flexibility and financial controls. We don't have to make any difficult tradeoffs." - Cheryl Warner, Director of Budgets [ more ]

"When I got here we used Excel for budgeting. It was cumbersome, painful and awful. Department heads are afraid of Excel. We sought the department managers opinion when we were evaluating a new product. They really liked XLerant because it was easier, more accurate, helped them justify their requests and made the process more thought provoking. What more could we ask for?" - Jeff Ginsberg, Director of Fiscal Affairs & Central Services [ more ]

"BudgetPak allows you to feel confident about the numbers and allows the budget process to be virtually stress free." - Lucille Marottolo, AVP Finance & Administration [ more ]

Press Releases

July 31, 2012- XLerant Inc. has announced that the University of Saint Joseph in Connecticut has selected BudgetPak™ to manage its budgeting and forecasting needs. The University of Saint Joseph joins Quinnipiac University as Connecticut-based colleges that have upgraded their budgeting software to XLerant's BudgetPak software. [ more ]

 XLerant's BudgetPak allows colleges, universities to link budget with strategy while weathering mounting economic pressure. XLerant, a leader in powerful budget preparation software, has signed five new clients in the higher education marketplace ... [ more ]

 XLerant, Inc., announced that Quinnipiac has selected BudgetPak™ to manage their budgeting and forecasting needs. Quinnipiac University is a private, coeducational university with 5,700 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. Consistently ranked among the best universities by U.S. News & World Report, Quinnipiac offers 52 undergraduate majors and 20 graduate programs plus the JD program. [ more ]

Webinars

Every college has them. Faculty and staff that make your life miserable during the budgeting or forecasting process. These are the people who simply do not behave the way you need them to behave to ensure an efficient and effective budget process.

They are:

Procrastinator - Does not submit on time
Victim - I don't know how to budget. I can't learn the system
Tinkerer - Wait, I want to make another change.
Critic - Your process is horrible. I don't like Excel. That's not my number
Mechanic - Wants to constantly change the template
Outlier – The one person in the organization who always has special needs

Come join us as we explore these six user personas, and tell you how to effectively handle their unique needs in a way that will not kill you or your process. [ more ]

Fisher College's President brought a renewed focus on having the right strategy -- and even more importantly -- executing that strategy. Join us to learn how Fisher College benefited from budgeting to strategy, and how they achieved that, and what else they are doing around budgeting to improve the process and the results for the college. [ more ]

 Learn about a revolutionary new approach to higher education budgeting that will engage your line managers, increase their sense of ownership and accountability, all while improving financial control. [ more ]

#1: You can't make Excel become a database application, and it does not have inherent knowledge of budgeting.  [ more ]

One area that Drew University has gained notoriety for is for developing "self service budgeting". By generating more active engagement with their department heads in the budget process, Drew has increased accountability and transparency; while instilling a greater sense of fiscal discipline throughout the college. This video focuses on the key changes the finance team made to lead this important effort. [ more ]

Learn how BudgetPak mapped against that criteria, and how RISD used this criteria to assess a proposed project to improve their budget process. [ more ]

 Budgeting to Strategy in Higher Ed: As a budget director in edu, you have a tough job. On one hand the institution is trying to recruit top-notch students & faculty; and on the other hand it needs to do more with less in order to deal with a struggling economy. How do you help accomplish both? There are many moving parts to this issue, but more strategic budgeting is a critical one.              [ more ]

 Hear how leading Colleges and Universities are managing the new normal of decreasing revenue, increasing costs, and unprecedented levels of scrutiny on the Budget. [ more ]

Blogs

#1. Faculty and staff do not enjoy the budget process and do not know and love Excel the way financial people do. They view this process as being "force-fed" from finance. #2. The Finance staff in many higher education institutions is "bare bones" or close to it. [ more ]

When President Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade, it became known as "the moon shot." The challenge was bold, the mission was clear, and everyone knew sacrifices had to be made to accomplish a great goal.

The moon shot for Higher Ed is to make college affordable. [ more ]

I was privileged this week to attend the annual EACUBO meeting in Hershey, PA. The event began with a keynote address from Erin Gruwel, author of Freedom Writers Diary and the founder of Freedom Writers Foundation. Erin's remarkable story was turned into a feature film in 2007 starring Hilary Swank.The video clip above is from an interview Hilary Swank did for ABC News describing this unique story. [ more ]

Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, is the leading expert on spreadsheet errors. Who makes them, why they happen, what rate they're seen in the average spreadsheet, you name it. He wrote a paper on the subject called What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors first published in the Journal of End User Computing. [ more ]

Every once in a while the sun and the moon and the stars all align just right to deliver an exceptional webinar. Such was the case recently when Linda Murphy Church presented how she used the rigorous Malcolm Baldrige Award criteria to access a critical decision the Rhode Island School of Design was facing. In her case, that decision was around the budgeting process and some enabling technology. But she was able to generalize her example in a way that made the whole approach accessible, even to those few that never even heard of Malcolm Baldrige. [ more ]

April 18, 2012- Administrators at the Rhode Island School of Design use the Baldrige criteria to re-engineer their budget process. The criteria lead the university to new software that ties the budget to the strategic plan, increases fiscal accountability organization-wide, and offers deep, intuitive functionality. [ more ]

As one person attending the event commented afterward, "We've been struggling with financial issues since 2008, and this is the most important webinar I've been to since. My only regret is we should have put these ideas to work for us three years ago. Better late than never." [ more ]

People think of Budgeting as an exercise of putting numbers in a template, and adding them up. But thinking of the budget as a " financial representation of the strategic plan" goes well beyond "let's do a X% increase over last year." [ more ]

I was honored to work with Howard Buxbaum on "Self Service Budgeting at Drew University" which appears in the November 2011 issue of Business Officer Magazine. [ more ]

I had the pleasure of participating in the annual EACUBO workshop at the end of March. Hands down, it was one of the best events I've ever attended.

For those of you who do not know EACUBO, the acronym stands for the Eastern Association of College & University Business Officers, and it is a regional group associated with NACUBO (the N stands for National, as you might guess). NACUBO's mission is to promote sound management and financial practices at colleges and universities. More than two-thirds of all institutions of higher education in the United States are members of NACUBO. [ more ]

You've been through the drill before. Some process in your organization needs fixing and a team is formed to address it. Before you know it, you're looking at software as a solution. That's not a bad thing, but the way we go about it often is. [ more ]

We recently brought together leading College and University Business Officers to discuss budgeting; and uncovered how these leaders were able to successfully transform their process – from a complex process with a lot of administrative burden, to a streamlined process that engages department heads and gets them to own their numbers. [ more ]

Malcolm Baldrige Award

When a client asks how your product will help achieve the goals of a strategic plan, it's a different game than just being asked what features you deliver. Administrators at the Rhode Island School fo Design (RISD) presented just such a challenge when they re-engineered their budget process in order to better align with the strategic plan and ensure fiscal accountability.  They achieved this goal by using The Malcom Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide their software purchasing process.

Read more to find out how that led them to XLerant...

Skip the features wars and "shiny object" traps that create quagmires when buying new software. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has found a better way to select a mission-critical budgeting program by applying the seven criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige framework. [ more ]

Learn how BudgetPak mapped against that criteria, and how RISD used this criteria to assess a proposed project to improve their budget process. [ more ]

"We needed the entire campus to be highly engaged in the budget process," she said. "Our goal is to give [staff] the tools to budget for those initiatives that support an aggressive, evolving, strategic plan. The Baldrige Criteria gave us great confidence in choosing the software that would meet those needs." [ more ]

Survey Results

 Two-thirds of U.S. college and university budget directors give their Excel-driven budget process a 'C' grade or lower. A survey by XLerant, Inc., shows that while mounting economic pressures make budgeting and planning more critical than ever, most collegiate budget leaders say their process falls short. [ more ]

Other

Do you believe that budgeting is a mission critical application? We do. And College Presidents and Vice President's of Finance are putting more and more scrutiny on the budget and the budgeting process than ever before. Higher education institutions need to ask themselves "Why do we have a mission critical function being done in Excel and suffer the limitations of Excel?" [ more ]

A funky roommate named recession is settling in on campuses this fall as colleges and universities slash budgets for virtually everything from ... [ more ]