Modernizing Financial Planning in Higher Education: Lessons from UC San Diego
Across California’s higher education landscape, finance teams are under increasing pressure to provide clearer insights, faster forecasts, and stronger financial stewardship. Yet many institutions still rely on manual spreadsheets maintained across departments—an approach that can slow decision-making and make it difficult to maintain consistency across complex organizations. Modern planning platforms are helping institutions move beyond these limitations by creating connected environments where financial data, forecasts, and strategic plans are managed collaboratively.
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) Health Sciences provides a compelling example of this shift. Like many large universities, UCSD’s financial planning processes had developed over time through hundreds of individual spreadsheets and databases maintained by departments. This approach made it difficult to standardize assumptions or quickly analyze financial changes across the organization.
As Rina Davison, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences Administration at UCSD, explained, “We’ve grown rapidly, but without the tools to support that growth. We couldn’t afford to keep expanding personnel, so we needed a modern solution to empower our existing team.”
UCSD partnered with Tru Consulting to implement a connected planning environment using the Anaplan platform, bringing together key processes such as budgeting, forecasting, and faculty portfolio planning into a unified system. Today, the platform supports more than 3,000 users across multiple university units, creating a standardized planning framework while improving transparency and collaboration across the institution.
According to Param Narayanan, Director of Business Analytics at UCSD Health Sciences, the transformation created new opportunities for insight and efficiency, “There was a massive opportunity to align planning, automate routine work, and deliver data-driven insights across the institution.”
For fund managers and financial analysts, the change has meant spending less time maintaining spreadsheets and manual reports and more time supporting the faculty, research programs, and strategic initiatives that define the university’s mission.
For colleges and universities exploring similar improvements, UCSD’s experience highlights how modern planning platforms can help institutions unify budgeting, forecasting, and reporting while enabling finance teams to provide more proactive insights to leadership.
Readers interested in UCSD’s planning transformation can read the full case study or hear directly from UCSD leaders Rina Davison and Param Narayanan, who share their insights in their own words. If you are interested in learning more about leveraging the Foundation for California Community Colleges’ agreement with Tru Consulting, please contact cbcontracts@foundationccc.org.
