Colorado State University got a clean bill of financial health from auditors last year -- quite a feat, given that CSU had installed a new financial system only the year before.

What does that have to do with Cornell? A lot, according to two keynote speakers for Kuali Day@Cornell, a daylong introduction to the Kuali Financial System (KFS) and two other Kuali systems that took place Jan. 13 on various locations on campus.

When Cornell launches KFS July 1, it can expect a system precisely tailored to fit a research university's needs for accounting and reporting, with a small price tag and few glitches, said Brad Wheeler of Indiana University (IU) and Troy Fluharty of CSU. That's because the Kuali Foundation, a consortium of colleges and universities that includes Cornell, developed KFS "for higher education, by higher education," as the foundation says.

The financial system that KFS will replace is 40 years old -- one of the oldest among colleges and universities in the country, said Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer Joanne DeStefano, who began the keynote session. "We are holding our breath on a daily basis until we have a new system," she said. "We don't even have people with the skills to maintain the system, because the technology is so obsolete."

KFS will provide a good bang for the buck, said Wheeler, who is chairman of the Kuali Foundation's board of directors and IU's vice president of information technologies and chief information officer. Although IU pitched in $3 million to develop KFS, more than any other consortium member, it's a fraction of the $23 million to $28 million it would have cost to buy an off-the-shelf system that "we would have had to stand on its head and turn sideways to hopefully fit," he said. "That is cash we left for faculty salaries, for student scholarships and to build new labs. That's what you guys are doing."

That goes for some of the other Kuali Foundation systems Cornell is also implementing, he said. They include Kuali Coeus, which will help with research-related administration, and Rice, a middleware on which the Kuali applications run and that provides workflow capabilities that tie all the systems together for users.

Getting KFS up and running won't be easy, said Fluharty, university controller and director of business and financial services for CSU, which implemented KFS in 2009. But if CSU's experience is any guide, help from the consortium should ease the transition. CSU implemented KFS on budget and on time, thanks to colleagues at other universities who quickly provided multiple fixes when problems came up, Fluharty said. "If we sent out an e-mail at 5 o'clock at night … by the time we came in the next morning, usually we had either a total solution or good idea on the direction to go to solve our problems," he said.

DeStefano, Fluharty and Wheeler are all fans of KFS's workflow, which automatically routes "e-docs" to the right personnel, they said. E-docs can be used for such common financial transactions as purchase orders and travel reimbursements. And users can see the transaction's details and status online at any time. That's just one of thousands of improvements KFS should provide.

While systems developed by consensus may seem risky, the practice is in higher education's DNA, Wheeler said. "What better way for administration of higher education to build a cumulative tradition of working with each other, just as our scholars and faculty have done with teaching and research for millennia. We are aligning the administrative work of the university to the core values of higher education. And that is not so crazy after all," he said.