Rebekah Russell is a dedicated, high-energy leader in the central budget office at Western Kentucky University, where she is the Interim Assistant VP for Budget, Financial Planning and Analytics. Rebekah says everyone is fully committed to the University’s mission: to prepare students to be productive, engaged, and socially responsible.
“We didn’t want to piece together a stack of financial planning solutions,” Rebekah said. “We were looking for a single solution that could do it all: modernize financial planning across the university.” The Western Kentucky University central budget office selected the Axiom Higher Education Suite to more closely connect their office with the budget offices of various university units. Specifically, they needed to collect and distribute information quickly from the central office to the unit budget offices and streamline their collaborative processes.
They chose Axiom for tuition planning, budgeting, allocations, long-range forecasting, and scenario planning. Together, these tools help the central budget office modernize budget creation and monitoring, and long-term forecasting. “The fact that the Syntellis team we’d be working with had backgrounds in higher education really made the decision easier,” Rebekah said.
The results? Axiom made it possible for Rebekah and team to streamline or eliminate a number of manual, cumbersome, and error-prone tasks. Importantly, Western Kentucky University’s budget offices are now empowered to independently report, own their data, and improve decision-making. Perhaps most importantly, Axiom helped to increase trust and transparency to drive accountability and ownership of budgets and strategy. Congratulations to Rebekah and Western Kentucky University for the 2021 MVP Award for Higher Education!