Continuous Improvement Corner: The Last (and Earliest) Settlement

The Office of Financial Planning & Analysis recently scored a two-for-one on process improvement when the team used new tools to enhance yearly settlement reports and delivered those reports to schools and units in record time.

The Background

A key element of Finance Strategic Transformation was the movement from budgetary spending authority to base spending authority, or the transition to a "hard funding" budgetary model.  As a result of this change, schools and units will have the ability to run a trial balance on any combination of FDM worktags at any time.  That's a welcome change!  However, OFP&A had to work off of the old model one last year, and also do it as quickly as possible so that schools and units could apply knowledge of their current fund balances to the fund balance realignment exercise.  

The Old Process

Each year since 2016 (when the University Financial Model was instituted), the Office of Financial Planning & Analysis had undergone a complicated process at the turn of the fiscal year in order to provide schools and units with a year-end settlement and carryforward calculations.   The process involved pulling data from multiple sources, moving it to Excel, and adding and subtracting and combining everything for a bottom line total.  This complicated flurry of work was necessary in order to give schools and units a rough idea of their financial situation.

Complications from FST Changes

Team members Keith Carter and Rohan Patel were faced with a September deadline to get provide the last year-end settlement to schools and units.  However, the 2022 transition to Workday Financials made the process even more difficult, because the reports they had traditionally used in UBI to gather the data were no longer an option.  They were going to have to recreate the process one more time before the new process took effect.  

A New Method to Get the Data

Carter and Patel needed a different methodology to get the data they needed for the year-end settlement.  After pursuing a few options that were non-starters, Patel finally landed on MySheet as their method of choice.  In MySheet, Patel expanded the columns available so that he could bring in additional fields that they needed for the year-end settlement reporting.  After extensive effort, he and Carter tested their results and found that their data was solid.  With a solution in place, they were able to run the numbers and provide the necessary year-end reports by the end of August instead of the original September deadline.  Using MySheet, the team was also able to provide schools and units with a tie back to historical balances in Oracle, so it was clear how current data related to past data. 

The Result of the Improvement

Not only did this process improvement provide a new and better way to get data needed for the last year-end settlement report that our UVA partners will need after FST, but also, it meant that OFP&A was able to provide the data to schools and units in record time.  The timing element was especially important this year, due to fund balance realignment.  With correct and useful year-end data in their hands, schools and units could review the funds allocated to them and make necessary changes before the three-phase fund balance realignment process wrapped up on September 22.   

Congratulations to the OFP&A Team's Keith Carter, Brian Longwood, Rohan Patel, and Katie Walker, for their Continuous Improvement thinking, collaboration, and commitment to our financial partners at UVA!