Objective
The enterprise-wide 10-Year Financial Plan provides leadership with a long-term view of institutional finances. This enables the organization to understand the institution from the following perspectives:
- Income Statement – how operating revenues and expenses flow
- Balance Sheet – how cash and long-term debt balances change
- Cash Flow Statement – understanding the drivers of cash balances.
Key Elements
The 10-Year planning process provides a better understanding of the results of operations, specifically salaries and fringe benefits, debt, sources and uses of cash, restricted and unrestricted cash, generation of cash from operations, financing and investing, management of short-term and long-term debt, and additionally, provides the ability to assess the use of standard industry ratios for benchmarking.
The development of the 10-Year Plan requires the active participation of campus leadership to vet and support assumptions, make decisions, and prepare to present the results to internal and external groups.
Beneficial elements resulting from the four-year development process are:
- Planning by segment and combined view
- Creation of a base case
- Building sensitivity analyses
- Dynamic views of the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow statements
During the four years that the campus 10-Year Plan has been produced, the following sub-plans have been developed, clarified, and fully integrated into the 10-Year Plan:
- Comprehensive Capital Plan
- External Financing Plan
- Gifts and Endowment Plan
- Technology Plan
- Operating Plan (UPlan)
- Core Financial Plan
- Control Point Business Plans
The integration of these plans provides a clearer and more consistent set of assumptions for the organization, as well as allowing us to identify areas of large needs (underfunded capital maintenance). This process has also provided tools to develop a thoughtful vision of resource allocations to prioritize and address challenges as well as develop an approach to future expenditure growth, strategically positioning us for future success.