| Projects: | Staff Augmentation, AFR Automation |
| Organization: | The University of Texas System, Founded in 1883 |
| Number of Students: | 256,000 |
| Platform: | Workiva |
When we first spoke with UT System, they had been considering implementing Workiva for process improvement and automation for several years but were unable to get internal buy-in for the necessity of a new approach. Fortunately, Veronica Hinojosa Segura, NACD, D.C., the System’s Associate Vice Chancellor, began to get her team’s buy-in once FHB demonstrated the “art of the possible.”
“When I came on to this role six years ago, I was surprised to find that we were a $45 billion net-position organization, still consolidating financial statements with Word and Excel,” said Veronica. “It took almost an army of people. Once we received information from the campuses, to even try to consolidate, there was a lot of copying and pasting. So, inefficiency was the biggest driver for [change]. And then selfishly, my goal was to become best in class out of all the university systems in the country,” she said.
During that time, UT System lost several key finance team members, which led them to believe they would need to kill the process-improvement project altogether. They would have enough problems just completing year-end the old way, let alone taking on something new. “Around 120 years of institutional knowledge went out the door,” said Veronica. FHB agreed that this development would put the implementation at risk.
Instead of letting the team get stuck in a catch-22 situation (needing new tools to become more efficient and require less staff time, while being unable to implement new tools because of needing more staff time), we pointed out that many clients hire FHB for staff augmentation, as we have a deep bench of CPAs with decades of experience working in the public sector, doing exactly the kind of work required of the UT team. That experience has given them first-hand knowledge of historic and upcoming pronouncements, including GASB 87, 94, and 96.
We proposed that the UT System team start “phase one” of their improvement initiative by hiring FHB to support them through year-end and ensure their success. This engagement provided the added benefit of allowing us to learn their processes and challenges firsthand.
In 2022, the UT System team was “stretched pretty thin,” said Jamie Frey, Director of Financial Innovation. At the outset of our engagement, they tasked the FHB team with consolidating variances in their Annual Financial Report (AFR); writing an explanation for the variances in the report’s management, discussion, and analysis (MD&A) section; and reviewing its footnotes.
“The FHB team did a great job,” said Jamie. “They have the expertise…I particularly liked the organized way they communicated back to us. Jan (FHB Principal Consultant Jan Brewer, CPA, CGMA, MBA) was instrumental in that. There was a worksheet, with a summary tab, and then it went into detail. And it was very easy to review. It had stoplights indicating issues or things we needed to look at. It was very organized, so it allowed us to easily look at the overview and see what we needed to dig into,” she said.
The success of the four-month Staff Augmentation project set the stage for future engagements between FHB and UT System.
Next, FHB undertook the project to help UT System streamline and improve their AFR preparation process, using reporting automation platform Workiva.
The Team
Throughout the AFR project, FHB’s expertise and experience shone through.
The UT team was thrilled with the combination of accounting acumen and technical expertise demonstrated by our team. They were further impressed with our deep understanding of Workiva.
Jamie also commended the project management leadership of FHB’s Kelsey Macke, PMP. “The team was very knowledgeable. The running of the meetings was very organized, the project plan was very organized and laid out. The FHB team pivoted when needed. In terms of running projects, they're very skilled,” she said.
“You have an excellent team,” Jamie added. I want to thank everyone we
worked with; it was a pleasure. So much talent, and the kind of talent
that we needed on this project,” she said.
“I was pleasantly surprised at the ease of automating the process,” said Veronica. Obviously, this was not FHB’s first rodeo; you had a template we could follow that made it so much easier for us. And Workiva is a very user-friendly tool. It looks and feels like Excel, something that my team was already used to,” she said.
The Outcome
In terms of the project’s outcome, UT anticipates significant time savings (particularly in the MD&A section of their AFR); improved collaboration; and mitigation of error.
“For us, I think collaboration is probably number one,” said Jamie. “I love the commenting feature. I love how you can filter and see what's for you. I love that our auditors can go directly in there and make their comments and it's going to be the latest version. We can respond directly and they can see the edits directly,” she said.
“We probably cut about three and a half to four weeks of time [out of the AFR process],
which came just in time, since the Comptroller's office has shortened our deadline,” said Veronica.
The UT System team is also happy to have established a repeatable, formalized business process that will help potential new hires and users get up to speed more quickly.
And last, but not least, the UT Team was thrilled with the Capstone Training provided by FHB at the project’s completion. The Capstone package includes one video that walks through UT System’s specific AFR process steps, and another video providing answers to their remaining questions.
“The Capstone video was excellent. I think you'll continue to hear that from your clients. That’s a great resource and we appreciate y'all doing that so much,” said Jamie.
At the close of the AFR project, the UT team felt well-positioned for the future. “We’re already seeing, as we roll this forward, some things that we can implement in the future to continue to make improvements. We’re so excited to see where this goes,” said Jamie.
“I absolutely think we're on the right track. This was a change that we needed,” said Jamie.