Case Study: Madison Area Technical College
Founded in 1912, Madison Area Technical College (“Madison College”) is a public technical and community college in Madison, Wisconsin. The school offers 175 associate degrees and technical diploma programs, as well as trade apprenticeships and other certifications, as well as over 150 career training programs, including liberal arts transfer and online degree programs. The College also helps students with job placement through established partnerships with the business community, and has an impressive track record with 93 percent of MATC graduates finding jobs within six months.
Financial System
Workday
Annual Operating Budget
Over $317 million total budget
Student Population
38,000
Business Need
Madison College wanted to replace Excel spreadsheets with a streamlined budgeting process for greater efficiency and accuracy.
Products
Questica Budget’s Operating, Capital, Salaries and Performance modules
Organizational Benefits
- Streamlined budgeting process with less risk of errors in the budget
- Improved functionality for preparing operating and capital budgets
- Ability to create what-if scenarios and build calculations for better planning
- Sharing the budget with stakeholders using the Balancing Act budget simulator tool
Business Challenge
Madison College previously had a manual budgeting process that required keeping track of up to 20 spreadsheets, making calculations outside of the budget, frequently checking for errors, and then manually entering data in their Workday financial system. Moreover, the College was limited with what they could do with their budget data, such as create forecasts or plan ahead for future budgets. As a result, Madison College searched for a unified budgeting system with greater functionality to manage their budget data, automate workflow, and provide access to multiple users with different roles at the College.
Solution
Following a competitive RFP process, Madison College chose Questica Budget’s full-featured budgeting solution to help them take charge of managing their budgets. Today, the budget team and approximately 80 non-financial staff are successfully preparing their operating, salaries and capital budgets. They particularly like how intuitive Questica Budget is to use, how entering budget data is easy, as well as the level of budget detail they can see. Looking forward, the College hopes to explore more of the features Questica Budget offers to discover what functions might be of value to them, as well as incorporate the Performance module into their budgeting process.
Organizational Benefits
Streamlined budgeting process with less risk of errors in the budget
Questica Budget improved Madison College’s budgeting process by ending the confusion of managing multiple spreadsheets and creating an efficient, time-saving process while increasing data accuracy. Questica Budget provides a number of the components the College was seeking, including a web-based platform with one point of data entry, the ability to see budget data in real-time, multi-year budgeting, scenario planning, reporting, role-based security access, a notification system and audit trail to keep track of changes.
Improved functionality for preparing operating and capital budgets
Questica Budget allows Madison College to develop their operating budget, as well as prepare multi-year budgets, forecasts and what-if scenarios. With the Workday integration, the budget team is able to import actuals into Questica Budget as a simple process that runs every week. For capital projects, the College adds project milestones which have proven useful when they are tracking the timing for specific facilities projects. The College also appreciates how easy it is to look up capital projects in Questica Budget, check the project budget and justifications, and see all of the relevant project information in one place.
Ability to create what-if scenarios and build calculations for better planning
Unlimited what-if scenarios can be created in Questica Budget during the budgeting process. Madison College looks forward to introducing scenario planning to non-financial staff to help them understand the impact of enrollment, funding changes, and staff costs for each of their faculties and programs. In addition, the College has started building calculations related to funding and enrollments to make it even easier for managers to enter their budget requests.
Sharing the budget with stakeholders using the Balancing Act budget simulator
Madison College is pleased to have the ability to share their budget with stakeholders using Balancing Act, a budgeting simulator tool that directly integrates with Questica Budget and helps organizations share their budgets and solicit feedback from stakeholders about their programs and services. The College believes the budgeting simulator provides an engagement opportunity for helping staff, students and the greater community understand Madison College’s budgeting decisions. Users can makes changes to the budget in Balancing Act and look at how budget changes can have a direct impact on the College’s program and service offerings.
Questica Budget helps Madison Area Technical College transform their budgeting process and fulfill their mission of “open access to quality higher education that fosters lifelong learning and success within our communities.”
