OSU-CHS Streamlines Billing and Finance Management with Cayuse

Challenge

The Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences is a public academic health center comprised of five medical schools serving over 350 doctoral students and employing more than 700 full- and part-time academic staff members. It also contains the largest osteopathic teaching center in the United States, with over 150 resident Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine trained every year.

In early 2021, OSU-CHS’s post-award office split from the Office of Research to begin reporting under the CFO due to several post-award management issues that required special attention. Billing, in particular, presented a challenge to the current accounting team, who understood billing processes but were less familiar with the center’s financial system, Ellusian Banner, and many specifics unique to post-award financial management. 

As part of the reorganization, OSU-CHS hired Michael Sauer to serve as the center’s first Director of Grants, Contracts, and Post-Award Administration. Michael found that the department’s accounting teams needed tools that would help them better understand post-award requirements such as effort reporting and provide a friendlier end-user experience than Ellusian Banner.

Solution

While looking for a better post-award financial management solution, Michael found that OSU-CHS’s pre-award teams had already implemented Cayuse Proposals (S2S) and Sponsored Projects to help organize and manage proposal submissions. With OSU-CHS also considering Cayuse Project Effort for effort reporting and management, the team saw an opportunity to add Cayuse Fund Manager as well to help address their billing and accounting challenges. 

In addition to the ability to easily integrate Fund Manager into OSU-CHS’s existing Cayuse solutions, the team was drawn to Fund Manager’s configurability. “Fund manager is a product that you can make your own,” Michael observed, “it’s very configurable to your own work habits and the structure of your department, so I could foresee that it could help us with billing in that we can take a look at things from a cost center perspective, which is not easy to do in Banner.”

With Proposals (S2S) already helping the pre-award team organize and submit far more proposals than was possible before the software’s adoption and Sponsored Projects’ assistance in centralizing data and standardizing operating procedures, it made sense to add Fund Manager to bring similar benefits to the post-award team.

Results

As the team undertook Fund Manager’s implementation, they were able to reassess and re-orient standard operating procedures in a way that made sense for both the post-award department and the organization as a whole. “We were a very tiny operation that was about to explode, and so we grew really, really fast,” Michael recalled, “and like any good software tool, we can frame our processes around it.” This meant that instead of forcing the department’s processes to fit the software’s requirements, Fund Manager enhanced the systems already in place.

While Fund Manager is still relatively new at OSU-CHS, teams are already anticipating and experiencing benefits from the software. Instead of submitting requests for essential information, members of the pre-award team and other departments are able to quickly log into Fund Manager and access the data themselves, saving valuable time for all stakeholders. 

“It will definitely help free up time for my team,” Michael elaborates, “because an individual faculty member and their staff can make decisions, can pull the information, and make projections themselves.” He likened the software to another tool in a utility belt: it doesn’t make the department’s work unnecessary, but instead provides support to accomplish tasks faster with less administrative burden.

For his own part, Michael enjoys the ability to conduct necessary high-level reporting with Fund Manager. Whenever he has a question or needs a better view of the data, he can quickly access Fund Manager to get what he needs. The software’s role-specific dashboard gives him a fast, “bird’s-eye” of any given award. He expects that Chairs and Deans will experience similar benefits as more users grow accustomed to Fund Manager. 

Fund Manager’s distribution feature has also been very useful for Michael. “It’s so much easier going into FM and looking and just doing a couple of hyperlinks and looking at a person’s distribution,” he reports, “especially if they have a complicated distribution or current distribution.”

His team has also enjoyed the switch to Fund Manager for its ease of use and transparency, and Michael anticipates that those who have not yet been introduced to the system will enjoy it. “Cayuse is far more user-friendly and accurate than the system that we used before… I foresee FM being a big game changer and [the team] will really like it a lot more than the PDFs they used to have to sign.”

Overall, Michael and OSU-CHS are very satisfied with Cayuse Sponsored Projects, Proposals (S2S), Fund Manager, and Project Effort and the time and effort these solutions have saved for teams across the organization. As research projects at OSU-CHS continue to increase in size and scope, they are glad to have a research administration software suite that is configurable and equipped to grow in tandem with institutional demands.