In modern-day higher education, colleges and universities need robust, easy to use, and efficient data reporting systems. For years, Idaho State University (ISU) faced multiple challenges accessing their financial data. ISU's reporting process involved manual creation and execution of reports using Ellucian Banner and Argos. In addition to the cumbersome reporting tools, ISU's Argos reports were built on a data warehouse architecture, ODS, which was being deprecated by the software provider, Ellucian. To address these challenges, ISU implemented Millennium’s FAST suite of data reporting applications, revolutionizing their fiscal management and reporting processes. I spoke with Brandon Klassen, Associate Controller for financial reporting and analysis at ISU, about his experience implementing FAST Finance reporting.
Brandon Klassen, Associate Controller, explained that one of the standout features of FAST Finance is its out-of-the-box, robust reporting capabilities.
With out-of-the-box reporting to meet 90% of needs immediately, it's fully sufficient for most purposes. And for that 10% of the time where something more specific is needed, the query tool allows one to create a tailor-made report that fulfills the need perfectly. The capabilities are so vast in FAST that even after all this time I still have not found the boundaries. No other reporting tool that I have ever worked with even comes close in comparison.
ISU’s finance team now uses FAST primarily to generate reports essential for the quarterly and year-end close processes. The Alternate Hierarchy functionality within FAST allows for real-time financial statement generation, significantly reducing the time and effort required for report creation. Alternate Hierarchies allow ISU to group and summarize their financial data immediately based on the situation, without any IT intervention. The ability to create detailed queries has also significantly empowered the team to produce highly specific reports, reducing the time it takes to meet nonstandard requests.
The Level-4 FOAPAL (Fund, Organization, Account, Program, Activity, Location) Detail Actuals report allows users to drill down into financial data with unparalleled specificity. FAST’s multi-level filter functionality enables the creation of complex reports with up to ten separate filters, transforming otherwise intricate financial data into easily digestible insights.
According to Klassen, “The Level-4 FOAPAL Detail Actuals report can get so specific it’s like writing my own SQL query without actually writing—and the two levels of filters on reporting pages is phenomenal—I can spend hours here—our only limit is our creativity or imagination.”
Klassen described several improvements his team and others at ISU have benefited from since implementing FAST. Calculating the university’s indirect cost recovery rate has transformed from a cumbersome and often error-laden process into a simple report generated out of FAST Finance. By leveraging the tool’s ability to handle comma-delimited listings in the fund filter, the ISU finance team can now easily and efficiently identify and aggregate funds that incur direct expenses. This streamlined approach has significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of indirect cost recovery calculations.
FAST Finance has also enhanced the university’s audit preparedness. The finance team can now quickly and accurately respond to auditor queries, thanks to the system’s ability to provide detailed and comprehensive financial reports.
We have found that FAST is more efficient than our old tool
The biggest gains, however, have come from FAST’S extensive self-service reporting capabilities. Per Klassen, “We have found that FAST is more efficient than our old tool Argos and requires less manual work. Over the years we have gone from 10 individuals in our department down to four because we are able to focus on efficiencies and simply doing things better. FAST was a major tool in that respect. We were struggling constantly to get to the detail of our ERP system reports—auditors would ask questions and we couldn’t get that information easily, if at all—FAST has opened a whole new world for us--it understands the disconnect we were having and brings everything together.”
In the months and years to come, ISU plans to further integrate FAST’s applications across different departments. Klassen specifically pointed out that the use of FAST Student reporting has really benefited ISU’s short- and long-term financial planning. According to Klassen, “FAST Student allows for a direct line from the highest-level finance report to the specific course/student originating the charge—we would love to do something similar with the FAST HR [Human Resources] side as well.” Klassen and his colleagues at ISU are excited to explore new features such as the Graphical Query Builder and the Dashboard pinned report function to further enhance their financial and overall data reporting capabilities across university departments. ISU team members are also hoping to increase overall usage of FAST by implementing additional training and Dashboard pinned reports.
Due to the unparalleled ease of use and streamlined data integration capabilities of FAST, ISU has adopted most of the FAST applications including Finance, Budget, HR, and Student. They are in the process of implementing FAST Non-Student AR and the Journal Voucher applications.
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