Tidemark Launches Financial Planning Tool for Higher Ed
Tidemark has introduced Financial Planning for Higher Education, its first business planning and analytics app configured specifically for higher ed. Designed with input from the company's higher education clients, including Brown and the University of Miami, the cloud-based product provides a flexible, scalable platform for institutional planning, budgeting and reporting.
Tidemark enables schools to use a single platform for strategic planning, revenue planning, personnel budgeting (by fund, grant, project, etc.), departmental budgeting, capital planning and grant planning. All processes are integrated, so updates to the capital expenditure plan automatically flow to the strategic plan. Infographic-style visualizations provide stakeholders with easy-to-understand views of plans and financial data, while a mobile-first architecture provides users with anytime, anywhere access. Faculty and staff can collaborate, model scenarios, approve budgets, provide input and view progress in real time. All conversations, supporting documents and unstructured big data are captured, giving users access to the full context of the data.
Using Tidemark, an institution's budget office can monitor strategic planning, budget development, reporting and analysis, no matter how many faculty and staff participate in the planning process. Administrators can gather multi-year projections of income drivers (including enrollment, tuition and grant funding), expense drivers (such as student aid, capital projects and debt), and other factors (such as non-discretionary inflationary items and reserve requirements). Built-in "best practices" templates allow schools to quickly formulate a strategic plan or develop departmental or position budgets, and configure them to specific institutional needs.
For more information, visit the Tidemark site.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at rkelly@1105media.com.