Monash College speeds up budgeting process by nearly 70%

As the Monash College experienced significant growth, the organization wanted to streamline its data management. The previous system in Excel was becoming increasingly complicated. Not only was the team managing multiple Excel templates, but version control issues and errors also made the budgeting process especially painful, prolonging it by several months. It was clear that the team needed an upgraded solution to better meet their needs.

Jedox has enabled Monash College to create a dynamic hierarchy system to allow for live changes to the organizational structure and to create parallel hierarchies to capture historical structures. This allows the system to adapt to business restructures as business segments and structures change. Reporting can be completed with the previous year’s organizational structure and provide organizational modeling for the future.

After the successful implementation of a Jedox budgeting workflow model, there was a desire to give planners more ownership of their budgets rather than confining budgeting and forecasting as a function of the finance organization. Monash College subsequently began publishing reports to Jedox Web and later implemented further enhancements.

In just two months, the finance team drafted and approved all three budget phases. Previously, this process in Excel could take the team six full months to complete. Utilizing an approval workflow in Jedox for budget phases, the team could review and approve each phase more quickly. The profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow model from Jedox have also helped improve accuracy and speed across the organization.

With Jedox, different members of the administration team – as well as operations and senior management – can now assist with various budgeting and procurement components. With many employees having strong Excel skills, it was easy for them to create report templates in Excel and then easily publish them on Jedox Web for a wider team to access the data.

Monash College’s continued growth has further reinforced how invaluable Jedox is to the organization. Simple templates have enabled more accurate reforecasting multiple times per year, and quicker uploads have enabled the reweighting of outstanding expenditure lines based on previous forecasts and actual Year-to-Date (YTD) expenditures. Monash College is now working on producing a user-based revenue forecasting model for its wide range of programs and integrating it with the existing workflow model. In the same way, the organization wants to produce a user-based payroll planning model for fixed term, ongoing, and casual staff that belong to different cost centers, where staff categories include nominated, nonteaching, teaching, and casual staff. It will also integrate the payroll planning model with the existing workflow model. The organization then aim to link the revenue forecast and payroll planning models to the existing general ledger (GL) model to enable true integrated business planning.