By SUSAN JONES
Pitt’s Budget ReSTART model has been around since 2022, but many faculty, staff and administrators still don’t completely understand how the model works in practical, every day use.
This was quite clear at the Senate Budget Policies committee meeting in January, where members had lots of questions for Thurman Wingrove, Pitt’s controller, after he gave a rundown of the budgeting process.
Wingrove said the Budget ReSTART (Revenue Sharing to Accelerate Responsive Transformation) is “not so much a budget model, but … is really a budget process.”
As part of ReSTART, several new groups and processes were put in place, including:
Executive Budget Committee: This group includes the four primary senior officers at the University — Provost Joe McCarthy; Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences; Dwayne Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor for finance and administration; and the chancellor’s office, represented by Bill Haldeman, vice chancellor and chief strategy officer. They ultimately make the final recommendations for which initiatives should move forward and be put in the budget for the next year.
Support Responsibility Center Committee: This helps the support units, such as Human Resources, Facilities Management, Pitt Digital and more, develop their budgets. There are 18 of these units, which don’t produce revenue but support all the schools. Wingrove said they meet with six of these units every three years on a rotating basis. The schools and other revenue-generating units have to provide money for the non-revenue-generating support units. The amount paid for each support service is determined by different metrics. For instance, the metric for Human Resources would be based on the number of employees in each school. This committee was established to have some oversight responsibility of the costs incurred in the support units.
Operational performance reviews: Those are the meetings Wingrove’s office has during the winter and spring with all of the responsibility centers to help develop the budget.
Responsibility center resource proposal (RCRP) requests: This is how RCs can submit any requests that they have for additional funding up through their Executive Budget Committee representative.
Wingrove said they’ve also established certain metrics to help the units evaluate their performance over a period of time, such as historical enrollment data, historical faculty and staff information, space usage and more. “Those are the types of things that we’re able to do now through this ReSTART process that allows us to do a better job of evaluating performance of all the RCs.
“The one big thing that I think causes most of the confusion with folks is … called the fully loaded income statements,” Wingrove said. “For the first time, with ReSTART, we’re now able to look at a school and look at the total revenue that a school generates and the total cost the school incurs.”
He said they weren’t really able to do that before, or at least not to the same extent.
For instance, he said, when money comes in from the state appropriation or from tuition it goes into a few central University accounts. Using the Swanson School of Engineering as an example, he said, when the school gets its monthly level (or budget) reports, they don’t see anything related to appropriation or tuition.
“What ReSTART is doing is taking all of that revenue that we’re holding in central University accounts, and it’s allocating it out to the schools, but it’s not allocating it directly into their monthly level reports,” Wingrove said. “This is being done … offline. It’s being done through a separate calculation. By allocating all the tuition to the schools, by allocating the appropriation to the schools, all the indirects to the schools, we’re able to determine how much revenue does the School of Engineering actually generate?
“Then what we do on the expense side is we take those 18 support units … and we do the same thing with them. We take those costs and we allocate those (overhead) costs to all of the primary units. … But we do it offline. We don’t do it in the University’s formal accounting system.
“So when folks say, well, we’re not seeing our tuition revenue, I think what they’re saying is they’re not seeing their tuition revenue in their monthly level reports. They’re not seeing it in their monthly budget reports that we’ve been sending out to the units for 50 years. But we’re doing it in my area through the ReSTART model. We’re doing it through an offline application to be able to generate these income statements for each of the primary units.”
Those fully loaded income statements for the past four or five years are provided to the responsibility centers’ directors of administration and used in the operational performance review meetings. He used the School of Dental Medicine as an example.
“It’s going to allow them to be able to see their own trends, how’s their performance changed over that period of time,” Wingrove said. “We can ask questions, and it’s a tool then that the dean within the dental school, in this example, can use to evaluate her performance. Dr. Shekhar can use that to evaluate the performance of the dental school. It’s a new tool that we didn’t have before that allows us to evaluate financial performance.”
The statements are at the school or responsibility center level, not at the department level, he said. “It’s complicated enough to be able to take the tuition dollars and figure out a way to allocate those down to each individual responsibility center, let alone then taking it another step or two, getting in the individual department.”
One area of confusion continues to be what constitutes a responsibility center, said Lisa Parker, professor in the School of Public Health. “Back in the day, we were told, ‘Well, a department could decide to trade off between space and a student worker, because we’re a responsibility center management, and this is the beauty of this.’”
Wingrove clarified that academic departments are not RCs. For instance, the Department of Philosophy is part of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences RC. Each school can evaluate on its own how departments are performing.
Once the full University budget is approved by the Board of Trustees, Wingrove and his team prepare target letters for each of RCs that spells out what each units costs and revenue targets are. “That’s the budget that the units are actually able to see and work toward managing during the course of the year.”
Don Elliott, vice provost for budget and institutional effectiveness, said, “When we go through the process of looking at the budgets, we meet with each dean, and we’re not overly prescriptive in how the money’s spent, so they can pick and choose.”
The provost’s office meets with the deans and the directors of administration on a monthly basis, Elliott said. “We look at budget to actual goals. We look at burn rates, we look at spin patterns that are going on. So once they receive the budgets, we’re with them every month, talking through how they’re performing versus the budget, so that if there are issues that occur, we’re addressing those issues concurrently, and we’re not waiting three or four months down the line and then they’ve overspent or under spent, and now we’ve got an issue.”
Elliott also said they are looking at ways to improve communication with the RCs. He said they plan to increase the number of meetings with directors of administration from quarterly to monthly.
“And we’re going to create a community of practice where we’re all getting together and we’re making sure that everyone’s hearing the same message,” he said. “I think part of the issue is some people understand the process and how ReSTART works a little better than others, and the ones who don’t understand it as well don’t have a forum where they can sit and talk to their peers and talk about how it works.”
Budget background
The process for the 2026-27 budget started in September 2025, when the University submitted its budget request to the state. Pitt is asking for a 3.7% increase from the $151.5 million it has received annually since 2019.
In October and November, the different schools and units should be building their planning and budgeting committees and discussing their goals for the upcoming year, Wingrove said.
From December to February, Wingrove’s office starts providing guidance to the units on how they should submit their responsibility center resource proposal (RCRP) requests.
Then in February and March, they begin meeting with the units. First up are the support units, such as Human Resources, Facilities Management, Pitt Digital and more. There are 18 of these units, which don’t produce revenue but support all the schools
Then they meet with the revenue-generating units, which are primarily the schools.
Each RC then works with its senior officer, such as deans, to prioritize its budget request. The senior officer will deliberate with the Executive Budget Committee, and they’ll ultimately make final recommendations, Wingrove said.
In April, the parameters committee of the University Planning and Budgeting Committee (UPBC) meets to discuss the major parameters surrounding the the educational and general operating budget. They look at questions such as: What should the tuition rate increase be? Was there an increase in the Commonwealth appropriation? What about salary increases? Should there be any reallocations or budget reductions?
That information is then presented to the UPBC, which works with Wingrove’s office in May and June to create a preliminary budget to present to the Board of Trustees Budget and Finance Committee and ultimately to the full Board of Trustees for approval in mid-July. Once the budget is approved, Wingrove and his team prepare target letters for each of the units that spells out what each units’ costs and revenue targets are.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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