University College London Consolidates Financial Reporting Tools Across Departments
University College London (UCL) has
selected a new financial planning software suite to consolidate budgeting,
forecasting and reporting across all departments of the university.
UCL used to use several different financial reporting solutions for its
numerous business units, departments and schools, making the university's
budgeting and planning processes quite complicated. Administrators decided to
switch to an integrated solution university-wide and considered several
different options before deciding on Axiom
EPM's
higher education suite.
"Like many universities, we face the challenge of integrating a variety of
financial planning and monitoring activities across different lines of business
and various departments, and we needed a solution that would provide all users
with one clear picture of the organization's financial performance," said Julian
Carter, senior systems accountant for UCL, in a prepared statement.
Axiom EPM includes budgeting, planning, forecasting, scenario planning,
reporting, dashboards and mobile access. According to the company, the solution
enables the university to streamline its budgeting, forecasting and reporting
processes across the university "by consolidating both financial and
nonfinancial data from multiple sources to produce detailed department-level and
executive-level reports."
According to the company, Axiom EPM provides the university with several
other benefits as well. The application integrates with Microsoft Excel at the
business logic layer, so the university's report writers can work in a familiar
environment. It also includes the ability to create unique views of financial
and operational data depending on the audience's role in the organization, and
it can deliver reports to iPads and other mobile devices. The solution's
forecasting model also includes automated workflow and the ability to generate
reports quickly at the end of each month.
According to Carter, the implementation of Axiom EPM is set to begin soon and
the deployment process should be relatively quick.
University College London is a public research university located in London,
England. It serves 27,000 students and employs 4,000 academic and research
staff.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].