Overview
UCT Finance strives for a combination of good practice, stewardship and forward projection to provide the financial resources needed. Our financial aim is to provide for sustainable operations and the ability to invest in initiatives consistent with our mission.
We practise conservative financial management by striving for efficient recurrent operations that generate funds to support strategic initiatives.
Focus areas of UCT's financial plan
- Education. This encompasses the recurrent activities of teaching and scholarship. We target a small surplus from recurrent operations to hedge against unforeseen circumstances and to fund new initiatives.
- Research and similar operations. These tend to draw from specific funding and are usually outside the decision rights of university management, although monitoring and approval rights are often retained.
- Staff and student housing. Funding is required to cover these costs and provide enough resources for long-term maintenance and stock replenishment.
- Investment income and financing expenditure. Being volatile in nature, this is only used to seed new initiatives and other strategic choices.
- Capital expenditure. This is undertaken in terms of the strategic framework and is constrained by affordability in terms of available cash resources and borrowing capacity.
- Capital structure and financing. This refers to the relationship between reserves and borrowings, the extent to which these are underpinned by assets, the limitations on the alienability and the liquidity of the assets. It defines UCT's borrowing capacity. Debt finance is used conservatively and further constrained by the ability to service debt, both the interest and capital repayments.
- Cash-flow planning. This brings together the consequences of all the financial components above and provides a ready measure of the risk we face.
Comprehensive University Financial Plan
The Comprehensive University Financial Plan consists of seven distinct yet interrelated components that work together to pursue the university's goals over a number of years. See Downloads on right for full document.