Case Study: How UCLA Transformed Its Cash and Investment Strategy with Synario

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) faced an uncertain financial future. As its medical center and research organizations responded to the crisis, leadership projected significant strain on liquidity over the next 18 to 24 months.

UCLA’s Treasury Department needed to answer urgent questions:

• How much unrestricted cash was truly available?
• Could the university meet debt obligations and sustain strategic initiatives?
• Would reallocating cash today jeopardize long-term financial stability?

To navigate this uncertainty, UCLA turned to Synario to model, analyze, and communicate its financial outlook with clarity and confidence.

The Challenge: Balancing Immediate Liquidity Needs Against Long-Term Financial Resilience

As stated, UCLA anticipated a severe liquidity strain once COVID-19 hit, as its medical and research organizations mobilized against the crisis.

With campus and academic leadership already earmarking resources for strategic capital and mission-based investments, the pandemic’s financial ramifications extended well beyond its headline impacts on students, enrollment, and auxiliary units.

UCLA’s Treasury team was tasked with identifying as much unrestricted cash as possible for the chancellor to deploy to navigate the crisis.

The challenge, however, was not simply a matter of moving cash or liquidating investments. Any such actions carried lasting consequences, potentially undermining the university’s ability to sustain its long-term capital and mission-based investment plans.

The Treasury team, therefore, needed to solve two problems at once: identify funds available to the chancellor in the near term, while also understanding how changes in today’s liquidity would affect UCLA’s ability to meet future debt obligations, fund strategic initiatives, and withstand potential black swan events down the road.

 

The Solution: A Single Platform to Stress-Test Today’s Decisions & Tomorrow’s Strategy

Building a Dynamic, Multi-Variable Financial Model

UCLA accelerated the implementation of Synario, enabling the Treasury team to build a comprehensive financial model in a short timeframe.

The initial step was establishing a reliable baseline by incorporating known variables, including state and federal stimulus funding, planned debt issuance, committed cash outflows, and contractual and operational obligations. This baseline provided leadership with a grounded starting point rather than relying on worst-case assumptions alone.

With the foundation in place, Treasury expanded the model to reflect both operational realities and strategic priorities.

Using Synario’s alternative assumption tables, UCLA modeled:

• Workforce headcount and salary commitments
• Capital project borrowing
• Mission-based investment funding
• Expected operating cash flows
• Variability in projected spending

This allowed the team to move beyond static forecasting and incorporate the real drivers of financial performance.

“In Excel, we only had two or three levers that the chancellor was able to pull, and that was effectively how much money he was going to give to the provost and how much money he could borrow. But when we put it into Synario, we were actually able to model more. We were able to look at what happens if we slow down capital spend, if we were able to get debt financing, how would that impact our cash, and what that investment could do.”

– Dave Tseng, Senior Treasury Manager, UCLA

Scenario Planning with Built-In Flexibility

One of the most transformative features was Synario’s scenario manager.

Treasury created multiple spending scenarios to test the impact of underspending allocations, overspending commitments, and on-budget projections.

They also introduced project “toggles” to turn capital initiatives on and off. With each toggle, the model automatically updated liquidity projections, debt ratios, long-term cash balances, and working capital outlook.

By toggling capital projects on or off, UCLA’s financial projections and ratios updated automatically, giving leadership a dynamic view of the future. Rather than manually adjusting spreadsheets, they could explore the consequences of each decision in real time.

 

Exploring Long-Term Investment Reallocation

As liquidity strain proved less severe than initially feared, the strategic focus shifted.

The CFO asked a forward-looking question: Could surplus unrestricted cash be redeployed into long-term investments to generate reliable income over the next decade without jeopardizing liquidity metrics?

Using Synario, Treasury modeled ten-year projections to analyze:

• Expected returns from longer-term portfolios
• Impact on Days Cash on Hand (DCOH)
• Effects on debt service coverage
• Resilience under varying market conditions

This allowed UCLA to evaluate investment optimization strategies with data-driven confidence.

 

 

Centralizing Financial Intelligence

Beyond modeling scenarios, Synario replaced fragmented Excel sheets with a single, centralized platform. Key improvements included:

• Secure, controlled user access
• Reduced version-control risk
• Consistent assumptions across departments
• Interactive inputs for leadership exploration
• Transparent documentation of financial logic

Senior leaders could now ask, “Is this doable?” and receive rapid, credible analysis grounded in a shared financial framework.

“Instead of having standalone Excel sheets sitting here, there, and everywhere, we just have one central location to do it.”

– Dave Tseng, Senior Treasury Manager, UCLA

 

 

The Results: A Resilient Financial Framework & a Reimagined Role for Treasury

A More Positive Liquidity Outlook

As new information emerged, UCLA quickly updated its model and discovered the liquidity strain was less severe than originally feared.

The ability to demonstrate available unrestricted cash and show which financial levers could generate more if needed reduced tension among leadership and strengthened confidence in the institution’s financial resilience.

“Effectively, we were able to model ‘if we do not have as much cash burn as we were expecting, can we take all of that excess cash and invest it in longer-term portfolios, and how does that impact our liquidity outlook over the next ten years?’”

– Dave Tseng, Senior Treasury Manager, UCLA

 

Strategic Investment Optimization

With short-term liquidity concerns stabilized, leadership shifted focus to long-term revenue generation.

The Treasury team analyzed whether surplus unrestricted cash could be moved into longer-term investment portfolios to generate income over the next decade without negatively affecting liquidity metrics such as DCOH or debt service coverage.

Synario’s higher ed FP&A platform enabled UCLA to model ten-year impacts with clarity and confidence.

As shown in the graphic above, the interactive inputs on the left allow users to adjust key drivers influencing working capital projections, making it easy to explore how shifts in internal and external factors would affect future fund balances and supporting well-grounded reallocation decisions that balance stability with growth.

 

 

Elevated Role of Treasury

Perhaps the most transformative result was organizational. With Synario in place, the Treasury team shifted from responding to financial emergencies to proactively shaping strategic conversations.

Rather than being brought in to fund decisions that had already been made, Treasury became involved earlier in the process, stress-testing feasibility before commitments were finalized.

The result was not just better modeling, but better governance. Armed with rapid, data-backed answers to complex financial questions, the Treasury team emerged as a strategic partner in ideation sessions, a credible voice in executive decision-making, and a proactive contributor to mission-critical planning.

“Synario gives us a much more scientific approach to prove our analysis and say, ‘given what we know today, we feel pretty comfortable that we are going to be able to maintain a certain level of liquidity and still be able to do all of these initiatives that have a cash impact.’ And that wasn’t always the case in the past, when the analysis was done on someone’s spreadsheet that got lost somewhere.”

– Dave Tseng, Senior Treasury Manager, UCLA

From Survive to Thrive with Synario

What began as a crisis response evolved into a long-term transformation. By shifting from reactive spreadsheet modeling to dynamic strategic forecasting, UCLA moved from survival mode to proactive financial stewardship.

Synario gave the Treasury team the infrastructure to make that shift possible:

• A centralized, resilient financial model
• Real-time scenario analysis
• Interactive tools for leadership
• A rigorous framework for liquidity management and investment planning

In a moment of historic uncertainty, it provided exactly what UCLA needed — clarity, confidence, and control over its financial future.

The impact extended well beyond stabilizing the university’s near-term liquidity outlook. By unlocking new visibility into long-term risk and opportunity, Synario opened the door to more ambitious investment and strategic growth planning. 

Today, it remains UCLA leadership’s go-to tool for evaluating financial feasibility, analyzing risk, and supporting mission-driven initiatives, a testament to how the right modeling platform can permanently elevate the role of finance within higher education.

Ready to see what Synario can do for your institution? Schedule a personalized demo with our team and find out firsthand.