FInancial Systems | News

U Alabama Birmingham Applies eThority Reporting System to Accounting

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/01/10

The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Medicine will be adopting a new financial reporting application in an effort to consolidate account statements and manage financial commitments not tracked in traditional accounting systems in use at the university.

For the deployment, the department will use DataScholar from eThority.

The Department of Medicine will be using supplementary applications from eThority, including the Commitment Management eXtension to track financial data that isn't entered into the organization's general ledger and a Financial Centers eXtension to generate a snapshot view of an account's financial activity, with the ability to drill down for further detail. The department has about 1,500 faculty, staff, and trainees

"UAB's Department of Medicine is focusing on improving our understanding of the strategic and economic drivers of the competitive environment in which we work," said Edward Abraham, chairman of the department. "As we are faced with ever more challenging fiscal climates, we must improve our organizational performance in relation to our strategic goals. To achieve this, we needed a more sophisticated, yet user friendly analytical framework to provide tools that did not currently exist (or existed inconsistently in shadow systems)."

At the Educause annual conference earlier this month eThority announced a "zero-cost license" to colleges and universities that register with the company. That comes with a license for 500 users, a connection to any number of data sources, a data collection engine, visualization and analytics, ad hoc query capability, and a dashboard feature.

"The ZCL provides institutions and channel partners with the ability to deliver world-class reporting and analytics, regardless of their budget," said President and CEO, Mike Psenka. "The ZCL will change the way that higher education uses institutional analytics, moving it beyond siloed reporting and opening it up to all decision makers in a secure and compliant manner."

To obtain the license, interested schools must go through an application process "to ensure that the DataScholar Zero-Cost License is used to solve real problems, and that every deployment will be a success," the company said in a statement.