Case Study: Bucknell University achieves seamless collaborative budgeting with Workday Adaptive Planning

Bucknell University creates seamless workflows with cloud planning

Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, PA, faced a complex budgeting challenge: leadership wanted to reallocate existing departmental funds to support new strategic priorities like diversity and inclusion, but budgeting relied on roughly 200 spreadsheets across 150 cost‑center managers. That manual process produced data‑integrity issues, overwhelmed a two‑person finance team, and discouraged executive involvement because reviewing dozens of budgets was too time‑consuming.

Bucknell implemented Workday Adaptive Planning alongside Workday Human Capital and Financial Management and trained 150 users, creating a seamless, automated workflow and self‑service reporting. The result: faster, more accurate rollups (the finance team finished the budget a week early), stronger cross‑department collaboration, continuous engagement from budget owners, and greater executive visibility—enabling leaders to reallocate dollars toward strategic initiatives.

Bucknell University

Andrea Featherstone

Director of Budgets and Financial Modeling