Browse Toolkits

The role of Chief Business Officers (CBOs) frequently involves spearheading the creation of business value. CBOs offer a unique opportunity to serve as a driving force for decisions guided by data. Because they routinely engage with crucial data across the organization, CBOs are increasingly transforming this data into practical, forward-thinking insights that surpass conventional reporting duties. This toolkit provides CBOs with a constructed framework – visually represented as a journey map - to support colleges and universities on a path to responsible data infrastructure, management, and stewardship while advancing the use of analytics to support the institution's mission, vision, and values.

The Data Ecosystem Assessment is a tool designed for colleges and universities to gain insights into their institutional strengths and areas for improvement in data infrastructure, analytics, and usage. Its primary objective is to enhance institutions' capacity to better support students and generate actionable information for strategic financial planning, with a focus on achieving equitable student outcomes.

The IPEDS Peer Benchmarking solution empowers Chief Business Officers (CBOs) and other institutional leaders to identify key data trends, understand the potential institutional impacts of such trends, and translate data into meaningful action. Leveraging pre-populated Power BI dashboards, this comprehensive tool provides a strong data foundation for leaders, regardless of institutional level, sector, or background. The dashboards help stakeholders better understand their own data and assist in developing a roadmap for contextualized data-informed decision-making.

The Budget Builder toolkit provides flexible and customizable templates to support the process of gathering budget requests and input from institutional stakeholders. Templates are available in multiple formats, including Word, Excel, and discussion guide. The Word templates are designed with tables for easy conversion into fillable forms. Budget Builder resources prompt users to consider the expertise and time needed across different functional areas to implement and execute a budget initiative, while prioritizing students in the budget request process.

The Financial Impact Analysis provides a wide array of data visualizations to support the analysis of student outcomes and their related financial impact. Data table templates are built in Excel, and pre-built Power BI templates operate with Microsoft's free version of Power BI Desktop application. Once populated, these templates allow users to analyze enrollment, course-related data, financial data, and net tuition revenue. Program-level contribution margins can also be calculated using these tools.

Budget Builder for Grant Development and Sustainability offers a suite of customizable tools designed to assist in identifying resource needs and developing budgets. These tools can be tailored to support both internal grant development and review processes, as well as submissions to funders. The information gathered aids in planning for the long-term sustainability of grant-funded initiatives. Templates promote a 'systems thinking' approach to grant budget development.

The Program Scanner Toolkit equips colleges and universities with the insights and tools needed to align academic offerings with student success metrics and workforce needs while maintaining financial sustainability. Through interactive Power BI dashboards and robust benchmarking capabilities, the toolkit empowers institutional leaders to align academic offerings with labor market trends. Designed to serve diverse stakeholders—including CBOs, institutional researchers, academic deans, department chairs, and student success advisors—the toolkit facilitates informed, collaborative decision-making.

The Budget Equity Blueprint helps institutions examine and integrate an equity-minded focus into budget processes to increase equitable student outcomes and provide considerations for strategically funding high-impact equitable student success initiatives. Equity efforts focus on access, academic support, economic mobility through funding, and other support measures to identify and remove barriers affecting historically marginalized groups of students.

The Budget Process Assessment is a comprehensive survey designed to measure stakeholders' perceptions and comprehension of budget procedures. It also assesses awareness and understanding of the alignment of resource allocation decisions with equitable student success. By employing this assessment before and after the budget process, CBOs can gain valuable insights into budget management dynamics, communication effectiveness, and alignment of budgetary decisions with student-centric outcomes.

This toolkit offers an approach to strengthening collaborative practices. The resources can be leveraged to build and sustain collaborative capacity for resource planning, budgeting, and refining business office related processes that support improved, sustainable, scalable student outcomes. The tools include a Collaborative Assessment, four Collaboration Workbooks, and a Collaboration Jump Start Guide. The Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) contributed to the development, bringing expertise in integrated planning for student success.

The Funding Allocation Matrix is designed to help leaders and finance teams make objective decisions and prioritize student-centered investments during the annual or strategic budgeting processes. Provided in Microsoft Excel and Word, these tools help institutions evaluate and fund initiatives with the greatest positive impact on students. The tool places a student-centered focus on budget requests with particular emphasis on historically or currently marginalized populations, including racial/ethnic and low-income students.