A review of FY ’99 funding illustrates a variety of funding sources for the College:

Federal: $5,128,271
State: $39,632,697 (includes $6.8 million Fringe Benefit Support)
Local: $31,210,982

• To support the academic, administrative, and operational activities of the College by locating competitive sources of the quality goods and services required by the College community.
• To negotiate favorable terms, conditions and pricing and to arrange for delivery when and where needed.
• To monitor supplier compliance with purchase order contracts and resolve discrepancies.

During the past fiscal year, to further enhance the College’s ability to appropriately execute a wide range of financial functions, two organizational changes were made. A new position, Assistant to the Vice President of Administration and Finance, was created. This position, an extension to the Vice President’s Office, provides expertise in the areas of cash management, debt management, policy and compliance issues. Additionally, the budget development function, which had been part of the Fiscal Affairs Office, was combined with the institutional research function. A new department, Institutional Research and budget was formed. This organizational change brings expertise to the areas of budget development, external reporting, and the development, tracking and analysis of key financial performance parameters.

This fiscal year, the College began a three and one half-year project to implement a comprehensive integrated administrative computing solution. The College has purchased PeopleSoft, and Phase I, which include General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Purchasing, Billing and Accounts Receivable, is scheduled to be operational July 1, 2000. When this project is fully complete the College’s entire administrative infrastructure will reside in an Oracle relational database.

This system will measurably enhance our ability to maintain operative financial control by providing real time budgetary information in a timely manner to both users and managers, while cutting processing time and greatly improving upon our ad hoc reporting capability.

President’s Office
Chief Information Officer
Vice President, Academic Affairs
Vice President, Administration & Finance
Vice President, Institutional Advancement
Vice President, Student Life

Each Area Head receives a summary of historical expenditures, year –to-date expenditures for the current fiscal year, a detail electronic template for budget development purposes and the appropriate revenue and expenditure reports. The Area Heads then typically break out the data according to their internal organizational structure and pass the data on to the appropriate functional Budget Manager. It is at this level that the initial or Interim Budget is prepared from the bottom up and is eventually folded together as the aggregate level. Once the overall budget has been reviewed and double-checked it is summarized for approval and forwarded to the Board of Trustees for review and approval.

Once approved, typically in late April or May, the "Interim" Operating Budget is distributed for use and entered into the accounting system. Typically the State Legislature will enact an annual appropriation in late July or August. During the period between the initiation of the Interim Budget and the Legislature’s final action on the appropriation bill (June through August), the Area Heads and the Budget Office work together to identify and prioritize key expenditures and commitments that are not included within the Interim Budget and will be funded should additional funding become available.

The above process applies specifically to the Operating Budget that is comprised of two funding sources, the State Appropriation, and College Fee (day and evening undergraduate mandatory student fee). The value for FY ’99 was $46 million out of a total expenditure outlay of $78.6 million. The remaining budgetary funds essentially follow the same basic process except, since revenue(s) is known and projected locally it is not necessary to implement an Interim Budget. Additionally, the College maintains a Budget Committee that is comprised of key leaders across the College. Trust Fund Budget requests once developed are then funneled through the Area Head to the Budget Committee and then to the Board of Trustees.

In the area of financial accountability and reporting, the College has matured greatly over the past few years. The College engaged a public accounting firm and the accountants performed a Fiscal 1995 Balance Sheet audit and Management Letter. For Fiscal Year ’96 onward, the College’s comprehensive financial statements have been audited in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards. The College is also audited by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in connection with the Federal "Single Audit" requirement.

Salem State College has written procedures for its fiscal activity. This serves as a valuable training tool for employees. Additionally, it fulfills the State’s "Internal Control Plan" requirement.

The College has earnestly addressed its cash management responsibilities. During Fiscal Year 1993, after a thorough process, it entered into partnership with a local bank to consolidate all of its banking needs. Thus, improving its cash management and acquiring better service. Additionally, with the assistance of a consultant the College developed a comprehensive investment policy and investment operations document. During Fiscal Year 1999, the College’s Board of Trustees approved the College’s Investment Policy and College’s Investment Operations Document and it is currently in full operation.

As outlined in the Salem State College Institutional Advancement Strategic Plan, July 1998, the role of Institutional Advancement is multifaceted. Following are examples of the area’s role:

1. raising funds (unrestricted monies, scholarships, special events – Golf Tournament for Honors Program, Speakers Series, President’s Ball – departmental gifts, new endowed funds – Billings Family Scholarship, Dr. John M. George Memorial Scholarship, Waldren and Grace Lojko Endowment Fund, etc. – major gifts, Capital Campaign, Planned Gifts, and Grants, Campus Community Campaign)
2. creating and generating new opportunities as well as leveraging existing opportunities for the College’s strategic advancement (developing a Capital Campaign for the Business School, the Library and the new Center for the Arts at Central Campus, Business Partners Breakfast, professional organizations, speaking engagements on fund-raising subjects and about the College, strengthening endowments and enhancing endowed funds)
3. maintaining present relationships with constituencies (more targeted mailings, personal visits, increased alumni events, Speakers Series, government grants, increased activities with Chambers of Commerce, OSRAM Scholarship, Scholarship Reception)
4. building new relationships with constituencies (personal visits, President’s Breakfast, Golf Tournament, expanding volunteer leadership); and (e) coordinating external initiatives to ensure maximum benefits (working to coordinate campus-wide activities, e.g., growth of in-kind gifts, continuing to reach out through enhancing current and developing new activities).

1. raising funds for Salem State College through aggressive management of the "development" cycle - prospecting, screening, cultivating, soliciting, stewarding (better tracking of how gifts come in)
2. creating visibility for Institutional Advancement within Salem State College (seminars and workshops for student groups and quarterly publication of Advancing Salem State newsletter)
3. educating constituencies to the range of meaningful ways to participate and support the College’s mission
4. designing communications plan to support Institutional Advancement’s initiatives both internally and externally (Outlook newsletter, Advancing Salem State newsletter, The Case for Support of Salem State College, 1999)
5. building strategic alliances externally to create new opportunities for Salem Sate College (BankBoston, Fleet Bank, The Boston foundation, Associated Grantmakers of Boston).

During the past decade the aggregate funding for the Institution from all sources has kept pace with inflation yet the mix of funding, State and Non-State has changed and with no real growth the financial challenge has been how to maintain and even increase standards of performance while at the same time maintaining the physical infrastructure and funding much needed improvements to keep up with technology as it applies to the learning environment.

The transition from a "State Supported Instititution" to a "State Assisted Institution" combined with no real financial growth, the Board of Higher Education’s policies with regard to entrance standards for admissions and the need to move from a 1960’s technical infrastructure into the 21st Century have all combined to place the Institution under severe financial stress. In order to plan for growth, accommodate technology and maintain the physical infrastructure of the College spending priorities have changed.

There has been a strong focus for the last five years on deferred maintenance items, and the physical growth of the Campus. Central Campus, the old GTE plant was purchased and now houses the new bookstore, the new campus security facility, and The Enterprise Center operating as a business incubator. The Cat Cove Aqua-Culture facility was purchased, renovated and outfitted with the appropriate equipment. The Sullivan Building, Administration Building, and Meier Hall have all received significant funds for renovation and renewal. There has also been a strong financial focus on providing sufficient funds to bring the college into the new millennium. The entire campus has been networked; literally hundreds of computers have been purchased not only upgrading outdated office and administrative management systems, yet also creating modern computer labs on all three campuses including the construction of "smart classrooms"

In 1998 senior leadership recognized that the Institution’s main frame computer system and its various software systems, Financial Aid, Admissions, Student Records, Student Account Receivables simply were no longer sufficient to meet either our students or our business needs. As such the Institution embarked on a five-year plan resulting in purchasing an enterprise wide administrative computing system (PeopleSoft) and embarking upon a three-year program of implementation.

In summary a simple comparison of spending patterns between 1992 and 2000 clearly reflects the financial priorities of the college. In 1992 10% of all college expenditures were devoted to Plant Operations and Maintenance compared to an average of 15% to 18% in the last four fiscal periods. Another area that has seen increased financial resources is that of Academic Support, which has increased from about 7% of total expenditures in 1992 to almost 10% in 2000. The focus on infrastructure, facilities, and technology is required to fully bring the institution into the millennium and to provide our students with a competitive meaningful educational opportunity. Yet, it has been done with a cost. Programming budgets for academic departments have seen only modest growth over the last ten years and the addition of new programs (Occupational Therapy, Spanish) have further taxed already heavily burdened academic budgets. The financial challenge going forward is finding and allocating the increasing appropriate financial resources for academic programming.

Purchasing
Substantial effort has been exerted by the Purchasing Department in the implementation of the PeopleSoft Purchasing module. The automation and process redesign opportunities presented by the new system have been carefully developed and configured to provide a state of the art purchasing system. Testing began in April of 2000 with a go live date of June 2000. The future looks bright with electronic processing of requisitions and PO’s and greatly improved system speed and efficiency.

Institutional Research and Budget
Going forward the synergy developed with the combination of the Budget Development function with that of Institutional Research and the implementation of an Enterprise Computing Solution (PeopleSoft) will result in the following:

1. Providing an analytical connection between enrollment data variable(s) often used to develop academic programming strategies as well as high-level institutional strategic goals, with their relevant financial and budgetary data elements. This analytical marriage of financial resource data with educational census data will result in providing senior decision makers enhanced information upon which to make key senior level managerial decisions.
2. The decentralization of the computing environment, shared data amongst organizations, greater faculty access (networking) and the recent addition of a professional research analyst have and will continue to lend itself to more proactive partnering between Institutional Research and academic departments. This will serve to help promote a data rich environment for academic assessment and the relevant financial data to assist senior educational leaders to make the tough decisions with regard to the application of limited financial resources.
3. The implementation of PeopleSoft has resulted in much greater flexibility to customize the budget development process while also enhancing the ability of functional budget managers to access their budgetary and expenditure data as they may require.
4. As the College gradually adjusts its internal processes due to the implementation of PeopleSoft, it is projected that the current Statistician I position will be upgraded to that of Statistician III. As academic chairs become more cognizant of both the academic and financial data available, it is anticipated that the level of support for academic projects to increase. This will ultimately result in upgrading the current Statistician position to a professional level position and conversion of the current classified position to that of Administrative Assistant.
5. Finally, the centralizing of data within shared data tables combined with the organization’s re-engineering resulting from the PeopleSoft implementation has enhanced IRBD’s ability to develop meaningful performance parameters and indicators.