Temple University: Moving from a paper close to the cloud in just four weeks

Financial close and consolidation on spreadsheets is always difficult. Add in a literal paper trail, international collaboration, and rigid reporting formats, and the manual efforts can sometimes begin to buckle under the pressure. 

That was the monthly status quo for Temple University’s Finance team. They labored to manage the reporting and consolidation process across tens of thousands of grants and programs, with added complexity given their foreign campus in Tokyo. Running financial close and consolidation with spreadsheets and paper is, unfortunately, an all too common occurrence. But this Finance team had finally had enough. Their pinpoint focus on financial close and consolidation led them to Planful.

“Planful was the only vendor we evaluated that had a viable solution for the central portion of the financial closing and reporting process,” said David Marino, Controller and Associate Vice President at Temple University. 

Taking months to deploy a new solution, and the related process disruptions, just weren’t something they were willing to accept. David and team wanted to get time back, not have it taken away. They wanted close and consolidation to be faster and easier so they could focus on higher-value projects. Thanks to Planful’s rapid deployment, they had everything they needed in under a month. 

“We got up and running on Planful in 4 weeks,” said David. “The path for our team to start using and getting value from the platform was very fast and remarkably smooth.”

A month later, the university was running full consolidations, including complex allocations, restatements, journals, and currency conversions, all within Planful, with required data being automatically loaded from their existing systems and reports being automatically generated and formatted. Currency being instantly converted from Yen to U.S. Dollars. 

“Planful drives so many efficiencies for us and allows our team to focus on value-added activities,” said David. 

Planful also gave Temple a clear path to Continuous Planning. 

“We definitely see significant opportunities to expand the use of the Planful platform across our university ecosystem, including to our campus in Japan,” David added.

With Planful in their hands in just 4 weeks, Temple University realized:

• Fast time-to-value.
• Close and consolidation without the stress.
• More insights for everyone.
• A first step on their Continuous Planning journey.

To learn more about how Temple University uses Planful, read the full customer story here.