Category: Shared Governance

Understanding University Budget Models: Incremental, RCM, and Strategic Planning

This article is written for senior leaders in higher education, including vice-chancellors, provosts, deans, chief financial officers, and institutional planners. It assumes an advanced understanding of university operations, strategic planning, and the nuances of higher education finance. Why Budget Models Matter for University Strategy University budget models are more than accounting tools. They are strategic […]

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The Critical Role of Program Review and Optimisation in Higher Education

How Leading Universities Balance Mission and Financial Sustainability In today’s higher education environment, where institutions face funding volatility, increased regulatory scrutiny, and shifting learner expectations, program review and optimisation has evolved into core strategic functions. These processes are no longer solely about quality assurance or academic benchmarking; they now serve as vital tools for aligning […]

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Academic Resource Management: A Strategic Imperative for Modern Universities

Why Academic Resource Management Matters More Than Ever Universities across the globe are facing an inflection point. The financial pressures of declining government funding, rising operational costs, and increasingly complex learner demands are forcing institutions to rethink how they manage their academic resources. At the heart of this challenge lies academic resource management, a discipline […]

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How hard is it to run a university?

Very…but let’s elaborate. Professor Bill Massy, professor emeritus of education and business administration and former vice president and vice provost at Stanford University, states in his book “Resource Management for Colleges & Universities” that all colleges and universities are governed by an “internal economy”, which he defines as: “A university’s internal economy is the network […]

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Tough Financial Times in Higher Ed? – These two must-have reports will help!

TLDR: The last 10-15 years of low interest and low inflation were great but are now gone. You need the financial performance of every academic program and course available for review at any time. Comprehensive financial reviews of academic programs can no longer be done every 3-5 years, they need to be done at least […]

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Top 5 Higher Ed Financial Reports

I was thrilled to be invited to present at the 2022 Australian University Senior Finance Officers Group (AUSFOG) conference last week alongside Thomas King from Microsoft.  I was asked to present the reports that finance departments are actually using, so we took a look at 12 months of Power BI usage data to see which […]

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Higher Ed Rapid Insights – The start of your Advanced Financial Analytics Journey

We are proud to announce the launch of our new modelling solution, Rapid Insights. We developed Rapid Insights as a low risk, low cost entry into advanced financial analytics for Higher Education. The objective is to build a model of the entire institution in only days, rather than months or years. The exact number of […]

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Steam Engines, Tea Sets & Railroads – A brief history of Activity-Based Costing

TLDR! Activity-Based Costing (ABC) concepts have been around for yonks! (Australian/British slang for a long time) Ever since the 1770’s. ABC concepts have been largely ignored for yonks! ABC was formalized in the 1980’s. ABC is needed more than even now given the increasing complexity of modern business models and the growth of overhead to […]

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Transparency in Higher Education Expenditure

With Covid-19 striking the university sector hard (and suddenly) last year, the Commonwealth Government postponed the need for the university sector to provide their 2019 ‘Transparency in Higher Education Expenditure’ submission.  However, despite the ongoing impact to the sector in 2021, the decision was made to not only ask for the 2019 data, but also […]

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Don’t only use Student Credit Hours to allocate Cost!

Financial analysts use a wide range of cost allocation methods, including cost per student credit hour, in universities to calculate the cost of delivering courses and programs.  I will show you why this is fraught with danger and could cause more harm than good! In recent posts I have used data from our Australian demonstration […]

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