AMES, Iowa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Workiva (NYSE:WK), a leading provider of solutions for enterprise productivity, today announces that Florida Atlantic University and Temple University are among the higher education organizations using Wdesk to improve efficiencies and data consistency in their financial reporting and budgeting processes.
Universities and colleges are required to submit a wide variety of documents and reports to regulators, boards and the public. These documents can include annual budgets, monthly performance reports and Annual Financial Reports (AFR).
Temple University and its Associate Vice President and Controller, David Marino, initially turned to Wdesk to improve efficiency and data accuracy while building Temple’s AFR. Marino and his team subsequently expanded their use of Wdesk to streamline other reporting processes, including quarterly reporting, endowment and physical plant annual reporting, NCAA compliance reporting and annual financial statements for their pension and post-retirement plans.
“Wdesk was a must-have when I came over to non-profit from the corporate world,” said Marino. “Its cloud-based technology represents real progress, and Wdesk is the collaborative tool we were looking for to streamline our financial reporting process.”
Ilyse Wertheim, CPA, CGMA, and Associate Controller at Florida Atlantic University, and her team used Wdesk to complete their AFR and budget for their 10 colleges and five satellite campuses, which serve more than 30,000 students.
“We have more than 20 exhibits in our annual report. Wdesk makes it easy for every number and every year-over-year variance in the financial statements and supplementary data to be visibly supported for management review and audit purposes without having to open up what seems like a million linked Excel files,” Wertheim said.
“With Wdesk, we don’t have to start from scratch every year,” Wertheim added. “We rolled 2016 into 2017 and saved a lot of time and improved accuracy. Plus, the team can be working simultaneously in this cloud-based platform without file corruption or data-saving issues. The time savings has been substantial, and we were ready for our audit and our credit rating agencies.”
Marino said collaboration among the various process owners and stakeholders from the university’s 17 schools and colleges was challenging with legacy software in their former system. “The old system didn’t allow my team to track updates to individual documents or to identify who had made those changes, often leading to uncertainty if we were using the most current version of the file,” he said.
Wdesk provides Temple with a full audit trail that tracks every change by every user and offers Marino the ability to roll back changes. The platform also allows team members to make and resolve comments directly in their documents and reports. “We now have transparency with the new process,” he said. “Wdesk has given everyone a greater stake in the game.”
Wertheim said Wdesk gives her team at the university confidence in the accuracy of their financial reports. “With Wdesk, every number in our annual financial report is supported,” she said. “From an audit perspective, that is amazing.”
“With Wdesk, we are working smarter, not harder,” added Marino.
About Workiva
Workiva (NYSE:WK) delivers Wdesk, an intuitive cloud platform that modernizes how people work within thousands of organizations, including over 70 percent of the FORTUNE 500®. Wdesk is built upon a data management engine, offering controlled collaboration, data connections, granular permissions and a full audit trail. Wdesk helps mitigate risk, improves productivity and gives users confidence in their data-driven decisions. Workiva employs more than 1,200 people with offices in 16 cities. The company is headquartered in Ames, Iowa. For more information, visit workiva.com.
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