Case Study: Manhattanville College streamlines budgeting and uncovers $2M in savings with Ellucian Colleague

New Savings Through Transformed Budget Processes

Manhattanville College, a private liberal arts institution in Purchase, New York, was facing major pressure to improve its budgeting process as financial constraints tightened after the pandemic. Using Ellucian Colleague, the college had previously relied on emailed Excel spreadsheets and manual compilation for budget requests, which led to errors, poor visibility into prior-year comparisons, delayed approvals, and budgets often being finalized months after the fiscal year began.

Ellucian helped Manhattanville College streamline budgeting through the Colleague Self-Service Finance Management Budget Development Module. The college used it to centralize requests, enforce deadlines, limit non-salary spending, and adopt zero-based budgeting; this improved accuracy and speed, cut operating budget upload time from several days to about 20 minutes, and helped uncover more than $2 million in cost savings, including over $175,000 from duplicated software expenses.

Manhattanville College

Clarissa Cylich

Budget Director, Office of VP for Finance