A Blueprint for Finance Transformation at a Private Research University

How a rapid assessment gave a university’s controllership function a clear, prioritized path to modernize finance operations, reduce manual effort, and build a scalable operating model.

Client

Our client, a large private research institution, offers a broad academic portfolio that spans hundreds of undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Its financial footprint reflects that scale: an extensive operating budget, a multi-billion-dollar endowment, and an infrastructure that encompasses academic programs, a growing research enterprise, athletics, and expanding campus operations.

The finance and controllership function is a critical backbone for that infrastructure. It is responsible for maintaining financial integrity, regulatory compliance, and operational transparency across the institution's broad and evolving portfolio. The combination of scale and complexity made the controllership function a demanding environment to operate in.

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Challenge

The university had built a strong, dedicated finance organization with robust systems already in place. But, as the institution grew, the controllership function faced mounting pressures that limited its ability to operate efficiently and scale effectively. A faculty departure, capacity constraints across accounting teams, and siloed, manual workflows compounded one another. Teams were already working at or above capacity, so it was critical to enhance operations without disrupting the institution’s day-to-day demands. Finance leadership needed a way to stabilize operations in the near term while identifying a realistic path toward long-term transformation.

Our Phased Approach

Approach

EisnerAmper deployed a two-workstream approach: a rapid current state assessment paired with hands-on capacity to help stabilize operations while the assessment was underway. Our assessment focused on the controllership office with particular attention to gifts and investments, and covered accounting operations, tax, assurance, and compliance.

1. Project Mobilization & Stakeholder Alignment

The engagement began with establishing governance, communication cadences, and a documented request list, then aligning scope, objectives, and expected outcomes with the controller and functional leads. From there, the team gathered performance data through interviews across stakeholder interviews, document reviews, and current system evaluations.

2. Assessing the Current State

The team evaluated people, processes, and technology across every function in scope. That meant documenting more than 90 reconciliations, mapping system integration gaps across platforms, and clarifying role ownership and control environments.

3. Identifying Opportunities and Prioritization

The assessment produced ten prioritized improvement initiatives, organized by effort and impact, across the five dimensions of the target operating model: people, process, governance, digital, and data & insights.

4. Building a Transformation Roadmap

For each initiative, the team developed a detailed project charter covering objectives, milestones, deliverables, stakeholders, and effort and cost estimates. Those charters were then sequenced into an implementation roadmap based on impact and feasibility.

5. Providing Capacity Services and Interim Support

Throughout the engagement, our team provided hands-on interim accounting support across gifts and investments and fixed assets. That meant maintaining day-to-day operations and backfilling critical responsibilities during the assessment and through the fiscal year-end close. The controllership team never had to choose between running the department and evaluating it.

61 of the more than 90 monthly reconciliations were strong candidates for Oracle ARCS automation, a change that is projected to reduce manual reconciliation work by up to 90%.

a group of people sitting in a room with a projector screen

Results

The engagement gave the university finance leadership a comprehensive, actionable transformation blueprint built around ten prioritized initiatives, along with the insights and implementation tools needed to modernize operations across the full controllership function.

Improved Operational Efficiency: More than half of the reconciliations were strong candidates for Oracle ARCS automation, a change that is projected to reduce manual reconciliation work by up to 90%.
Scalable Operating Model Design: The university now has a preliminary future-state organizational design, including a benchmarked best-practice organizational chart to clarify roles, reduce duplicated effort, and better align capacity with workload demands across all controllership functions.
Strengthened Controls and Governance: The assessment surfaced critical control gaps that had gone unaddressed, including an unreconciled clearing account and highly concentrated reconciliation ownership. A standardized reconciliation strategy and governance framework now gives the client a path to stronger audit readiness and strengthened data trust.
Trusted Reporting and Data Visibility: By standardizing KPI definitions, aligning data models, and creating a future-state reporting architecture, we established a single source of truth, reducing duplication and enabling faster, more informed decisions.
Standardized Process and Documentation: New end-to-end process redesign charters for gifts and investments and fixed assets provided the university with current-state documentation, future-state designs, standardized controls, and defined ownership models to reduce variability and dependence on individual knowledge.
Phased Transformation Roadmap: Our 30-60-90-180+ day prioritizes all ten initiatives by impact and feasibility, giving finance leadership a clear, actionable plan aligned to their strategic and operational goals.

Beyond the specific initiatives, the engagement gave finance leadership confidence that the controllership function can keep pace with the university’s growth without compromising its financial integrity. By pairing interim capacity support with a rapid current-state assessment, the university was able to stabilize critical operations in the near-term while laying the foundation for a modern, scalable finance function.

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