Decentralize Budgeting and Planning

Datatel’s budget development and management solutions support your need to decentralize budget development activities, and automate the budget submission process. We deliver a secure and fully integrated tool that provides your budget officers with the baseline budget developed by your administration office. The budget officer worksheets provide related comparative information that is necessary to support your online budget submission and approval process.

Colleague Finance provides built-in control and security features that enable your institution to give the right administrative team members the ability to manage their own budgeting and planning activities.

With Colleague Finance, your institution will:

Create a total institution budget
Bring together the budget efforts across your institution. Our solution includes an integrated tool to support the development of the most significant financial component of your institutional budget – your personnel budget. Position-based budgets created in human resources can be combined with non-personnel budget data to create a complete institutional budget.
Define the budget preparation cycle
Set the stage for each budget preparation cycle by defining intermediate target completion dates, budget limits, and a starting point baseline budget. Then bring together these critical sets of comparative data to provide guidance for the budget preparation team.
Prepare your budget online
Each budget officer has access to a set of easy to use online tools to create a portion of the overall budget, including an electronic worksheet and a scenarios worksheet with justification notes.
Set up intermediate status reports
Instant status reports can be prepared to view the budget status at any time. Each report can be selected, sorted, and totaled a variety of different ways, with a choice to include or exclude supporting narrative information.
Forecast future budget needs
Historical data with user-defined calculations or formulas can be used to forecast future budget needs.
Update the general ledger seamlessly
Once the budget is completed and approved, the new budget totals are transmitted to the general ledger, taking advantage of user-determined distribution methods. Colleague Finance provides for ongoing online budget adjustments to support mid-year budget realignments.

To complete your solution, Datatel’s Professional Services Team will evaluate your current budget and planning processes, providing insight as to how you can streamline budget development. Datatel Consultants will ensure your budgeting and planning processes are aligned with your institution’s strategic and financial goals. The Professional Services Team can also assist your institution by training the infrequent user with easy and convenient online learning offerings.