Cornell launches new financial system

Kuali staff members
Jason Koski/University Photography
Leslie Planck, center, account representative for the College of Veterinary Medicine Accounting Service Center, submits the first electronic document of fiscal year 2012 at a July 1 ceremony in the East Hill Office Building. Also pictured are Barbara Sutton, left, functional lead of Cornell's Kuali Financial System Implementation Project, and Susan Schattschneider, director of the College of Veterinary Medicine Accounting Service Center.

Jason Koski/University Photography
Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance and chief financial officer, thanks staff members who implemented the KFS project, while Ted Dodds, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, looks on.

Cheers and confetti helped celebrate Cornell's launch of the Kuali Financial System (KFS) in a ceremony July 1 in the East Hill Office Building. Leslie Planck, an account representative from the College of Veterinary Medicine Accounting Service Center, submitted the first e-doc (electronic document) of fiscal year 2012 before the system was released campuswide.

KFS is a web-based, comprehensive suite of accounting software that replaces Cornell's decades-old, unsustainable mainframe financial systems. The new system provides electronic routing and approval of paperless documents and is supplemented by a new data-modeled information delivery and reporting tool.

"We did it! We have the best financial system ever. I want to thank every person here for your blood, sweat and tears," said Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance and chief financial officer, who opened the ceremony. "The fruits of our labor are just beginning, and we are really going to see the potential of this system over the next 20 years."

More than six years after the system was first introduced to DeStefano, the project has come to fruition. The majority of work was completed during a two-year collaboration among the Division of Financial Affairs, Cornell Information Technologies and the campus community. Said Ted Dodds, vice president for information technology and chief information officer: "It takes vision and a huge amount of initiative, guts as well as tenacity ... to arrive at this extraordinarily important moment in the development of systems at Cornell: software of, by and for higher education."

The software architecture that underlies KFS was created by a community of college and university partners known as the Kuali Foundation, a nonprofit corporation funded in part by a $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The foundation brings together academic institutions with a common interest in building community-source software specifically designed to meet the needs of higher education, without incurring the substantial costs of purchasing, customizing and licensing associated with commercial products.

Cornell, one of the original KFS partners, joined the Kuali Foundation in 2005 and has been a major contributor to its development ever since. KFS adheres to open-source standards and is free to use. The system is modular and is designed for future growth.

Project staff solicited functional input from more than 500 financial professionals across campus to create a new accounting structure, business processes and financial reporting tools. "This implementation impacts thousands of people; we would not have been able to accomplish it without the help of our many, many partners on campus. I am enormously appreciative of their efforts," said Kim Yeoh, associate controller and KFS project director.

While the campuswide release of KFS is an important milestone -- as it includes rollout of the Chart of Accounts, Financial Processing, Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Labor Distribution, and Contracts and Grants modules, as well as a new data warehouse and basic reporting features -- it is still largely limited to Cornell's "business critical" financial needs.

Over the next year, the KFS team will stabilize the system, deliver additional modules (Capital Assets, Effort Certification, Budget Construction, Endowment, Travel and Accounts Receivable) and provide enhanced reporting. The final phase of the project will culminate June 30, 2012, with the completion of these tasks.

University Controller Anne Shapiro perhaps said it best: "I had only one goal all along, and that was to turn on the switch. I always knew my goal would be met through the concept of a team pulling together for two years; not just the KFS team, but the entire university. And I am actually quite moved by that."

Extensive support resources for KFS are available online.

Glen Silver is the KFS/Kuali Coeus communications lead for Cornell Information Technologies.

 

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