Dartmouth's total projected budget for the 2010 fiscal year shows a $5.6 million surplus despite original projections of a $2.5 million deficit, according to Senior Vice President Steven Kadish. While the College of Arts and Sciences is expected to break even, the sum of the professional schools' budgets will likely account for a "modest" surplus, he said.
The budget for fiscal year 2011 is organized differently than in previous years because the budgets for the College and graduate schools are lumped together as a single entity for accounting purposes, Kadish said.
This "stream-lined" consolidation of finances was a major focus of the budget advisory committee, he said.
"When you are looking at a budget that is in pieces you lose some of the meaning," Kadish said. "When you look at a budget in its entirety, you gain a full understanding of how the expenses and revenues work, and you're less likely to have gaps in your financials."
More than 80 percent of the projected budget gap through fiscal year 2014 has been resolved, Kadish said.
Several proposed changes to the College's infrastructure are currently in the "mapping" phase, Antonia Jimenez, financial consultant for the College, said. The budget advisory committee is analyzing data regarding interactions between different divisions of the College in order to improve efficiency, she said.
Software incorporated into the College's financial system has collected data on spending patterns in all branches of the institution, Jimenez said.
"I'm pretty sure this is a sea change in terms of how we're looking at how work is done across Dartmouth," she said.
The College has applied new "best-practices" methodologies to its current construction projects and has saved nearly $10 million in expenses on the new Visual Arts Center, Chief Facilities Operator Linda Snyder said.
More vigorous bidding and a careful review of design documents an approach the College will continue in the future also contributed to the savings, she said.
The renovations to the Class of 1953 Commons will lower annual electricity and steam costs from $900,000 to $600,000 in the updated building, Snyder said.
To cut purchasing costs, the College will implement "strategic sourcing," which will improve the connection between consumers and purchasers of products at the College, Kadish said.
"We're hoping that we will see $3 million plus of savings just by purchasing smarter," Kadish said.
Four information technology projects found savings in services and support, print-to-digital transitions, the campus technology infrastructure and research computing, Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president of information technology and the College's chief information officer, said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. The most visible change is the addition of a new director to centralize information technology, she said.
A new Information Technology Support Center, which opened June 14, consolidates consultants from different departments into one centralized call center, according to Waite-Franzen.
The search to fill the new position is currently underway, according to Waite-Franzen, and the Information Technology Support Center, the educational technologies department and the classroom technology services will all report to the new director to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Technology services is also expecting $200,000 in annual savings from a change that reduced the number of servers in the data center by enabling one server to support multiple systems, she said.
Total savings from information technology improvements alone will total "over a million dollars" this fiscal year, Kadish said.
Dartmouth reported a total of $835 million in revenues and $830 million in expenses this past fiscal year, Kadish said. The Board of Trustees has approved an operating budget of $829 million for fiscal year 2011, which began July 1.
Dartmouth's endowment distribution the percentage of the endowment that is spent annually will be 5.4 percent for fiscal year 2011, according to Kadish. Prior to the financial crisis the endowment had reached a distribution rate of 7 percent, Kadish said, though historically the distribution ranged between 4 and 5 percent.
