Harvard University Budgeting System (HUBS)

The New Budgeting Tool

The Enterprise Budget & Planning System project was born out of a University-wide budget process assessment conducted in the fall of 2006. The assessment, called the Budget Process Review project, documented local business processes for both annual and long-range financial plans through interviews at 13 major schools and service units, and yielded the strong recommendation that the University implement an enterprise-wide budgeting system that would streamline its budgeting process and facilitate a more robust approach to financial planning.

During the Discovery Phase the EBPS project was tasked with the following:

• Selecting an enterprise software solution that meets the University’s needs for budgeting and planning.
• Developing a comprehensive proposal for implementing the selected solution across the enterprise.

After analyzing five leading software solutions, Hyperion System 9 Planning was selected to satisfy the University’s requirements.

The implementation focuses on replacing Excel and the University Fiscal Budget tool to ultimately reduce the effort spent by tub finance offices in the preparation, validation, and consolidation of local department budgets.

More specifically, the EBPS project seeks to provide: 

• Web-enabled, automated way for tub financial offices to build budget data collection templates for their local units.
• User-friendly interface by which department and tub users estimate, data-enter, annotate and submit their current year forecast and next fiscal year budget.
• Interactive and dynamic tools for tub financial offices to work with local units and submit the consolidated tub budget to the University Budget Office.
• Reporting capabilities for analyzing and understanding the budget, including comparisons of prior, current and future year budgets with closed period actuals, to validate and summarize submissions.

The project builds a framework for implementing more advanced functionality specifically excluded from the scope of this project, including: 

• Long-term or complex financial sub-models
• Capital projects budgeting
• Business Intelligence beyond those reports linked to the annual fiscal operating budget cycle

By design/charter, the EBPS will not include the capacity to record and track budgets for sponsored awards. While some schools started using EBPS for the FY10 budget cycle the Law School began using the tool with the FY11 budget cycle.

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The FY12 Budget Memo