Associated Student Government’s Fiscal Affairs Committee is seeking to improve the University’s system of financial reporting for line item organizations. Committee members are already examining several potential changes to streamline financial data collection across campus.
Committee Chair Joel Franz said the committee is mainly focused on reorganizing the reportage appendix and adding blank spreadsheets to make it easier for organizational leaders to understand. By organizing the system into a comprehensible series of spreadsheets, line item organizations would simply place the necessary financial information from the University’s business intelligence program into the form.
The potential changes were inspired by an analysis of reportage appendices from previous years where the committee discovered only a small amount of financial report submissions from line item organizations. This school year saw the greatest number of submissions in the last few years, but still less than half of the organizations turned in the full requisite forms.
Franz is concerned about the way this lack of financial information affects these organizations’ ability to properly function.
“We’ve been allocating money on student fees to those accounts,” he explained, “and not necessarily in the past have we been auditing them and making sure that things are going smoothly, and also, it kind of doesn’t allow us to support them as well.”
Franz hopes that, by making entries into the new system easier, ASG will be better equipped to meet the needs of line item organizations individually. Although policy dictates that the student government meet with each organization to review their resource allocation, time constraints often make it difficult for every meeting to take place. He explains that understanding these financial statements will enable the committee to better predict or “forecast” the monetary needs of the organizations.
“Our goal is basically to make this, like, the front end of collecting all the information way quicker and easier,” said Franz. “And then on the back end, basically it would allow us to do a lot more forecasting and help the organization.”
The committee is still brainstorming ways to increase the efficiency and ease of financial reporting, and they are actively seeking feedback from students and line item organizations. Franz says that the ultimate goal of the potential restructuring is to understand how best to help campus organizations.
“We just want to make it really easy for that to all, like, get submitted, and then it would kind of allow us to grow on how we interact with the line item organizations,” he said. “It would allow us to give them a little more resources.”
