There’s an adage about budgeting that Andrew Rauch likes to keep in mind: “You know you’re doing your job well when nobody’s happy.” And as budget director for Metropolitan State University of Denver, Rauch often reminds department leaders that budgeting concerns itself with the allocation of scarce resources.
So, when planning the Fiscal Year 2025 budget, Rauch and his colleagues strove for greater transparency about the University’s resources, while also encouraging managers to participate more directly in setting and managing spending plans.
“I think the transparency has been received well,” he said. “Nobody really got everything that they wanted. We had to make some tradeoffs.”
The University’s budgeting process has traditionally been more centralized, Rauch said, so for more distributed decision-making to work, managers need to have a clear idea of how and why priorities are set.
Andrew Rauch“We’re trying to help people understand that your budget is your budget for a reason,” he said. “We understand that sometimes things ebb and flow. You may be under one year. You may have some additional expenditures that you didn’t foresee in another year. How do we support you in that, versus creating a mentality where you have to be exactly on every year or we’re coming for your budget?”
At the same time, he said, “We’re trying to instill some budget discipline: ‘OK, this is how much money I’ve got. This is how much I can spend, and I sort of know where my trends are.’”
Rauch acquired extensive experience in budget and policy planning before coming to MSU Denver in November 2023. He grew up in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest, studied economics as an undergraduate and earned his master of public policy degree from the College of William and Mary.
Fresh out of graduate school, he spent a year in Santa Fe working as a program evaluator for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, then returned to Colorado to work for the Department of Higher Education. He briefly worked in the private sector before taking on roles in the Colorado Department of Human Services and the Behavioral Health Administration.
FY 25 – the fiscal year that started July 1 – was Rauch’s first full budget cycle at MSU Denver.
“I had a little bit of insight into it from my time in the Colorado Department of Higher Education in terms of knowing how the institution functioned,” he said. “But coming in on the backside of the pandemic, where you’d seen significant enrollment decreases and trying to figure out how do we stabilize, how do we make structural investments that really drive us forward – there was a lot of conversation about that.”
The budget office utilizes the Workday software platform, which was implemented the year before Rauch started at the university to streamline resource and HR planning. “It really is something that is designed to create more transparency and ownership of resources and give folks the tools to see their allocations and their available resources,” he said.
The new system also enables the budget office to provide real-time information to university governance, Rauch said.
“We were able to utilize some of the elements within the system to upload budgets in a more streamlined manner. We’ve been able to show them, here’s where we’re at every step along the way.”
