University College London Consolidates Financial Reporting Tools Across Departments

University College London Consolidates Financial Reporting Tools Across Departments By Leila Meyer January 23, 2014

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.