Budgeting at Wake Forest University used to be laborious. Academic and administrative departments had separate, manual workflows that were cumbersome. This restricted critical tasks and budget input to a small group of administrators and financial planners.
Conflicting, inflexible data in budgets required back-and-forth communications to get to the facts and did not follow a standardised workflow. The length of time to create the budget information was often stale or outdated. And connecting the dots between plans, workforce and financials took significant effort.
Seamless real-time budgeting and capital planning.
To bring everyone together and improve budget and capital planning, Wake Forest deployed Workday Adaptive Planning. The university already had Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday Financial Management, so they provided the ready-to-go data foundation to support connected workflows for academic and administrative departments.
Instead of managing disparate silos and processes, Wake Forest University now has one shared source of data for managing resources, budgets and plans. Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management automatically feed data into Workday Adaptive Planning. And employees have one single-sign-on process and one shared, easy-to-navigate experience.
Invites broad participation.
More than 100 campus-wide decision-makers now participate in the budget-creation process. Learning how to use Workday Adaptive Planning was easy, and people have confidence that the time they invest will result in faster budget approval to fund their goals.
Administrators have comprehensive, real-time insight into the centralised budgets for academic departments as well as the decentralised budgets for administrative Campus Life departments, such as recreation, police and counselling services. Decision-makers also use the same platform to manage financials, workforce and planning.
Speeds efficiency and empowers people.
Preparing Workday Adaptive Planning to deploy the budget cycle now takes one to two weeks instead of two months, and decision-makers have on-demand access to the information they need. Using the intuitive self-service capabilities of Workday Adaptive Planning, at any time they can run reports and download data and they can quickly connect the costs of activities to departments and resources.
People can avoid having to manually enter data multiple times because information automatically flows from Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management to Workday Adaptive Planning. And because all data is automatically updated in real time, decision-makers no longer have to manually fact check. They know the numbers they see are accurate.
Delivers accurate data.
Month-end now often takes only four days to close with Workday Financial Management because of the increased accuracy of the data and the speed of the processes leading up to it. The ability to look at different views on certain data has freed up time for the finance team to focus more on expenditure analysis, and quickly pull data as they prepare for audit.
End users are able to key their own invoices and watch the audit trail throughout the entire process now that every transaction is tracked and every action logged. By transferring ownership and responsibility to the business units, the end users have been given the ability to manage their own destiny.