The Kuali Financial System (KFS) project is working to create a comprehensive suite of financial software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. Its partner institutions are colleges, universities, and interested organizations that share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for their software requirements. The goal of KFS is to bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services.
Since early 2005, the then "Kuali Project" has focused on developing an enterprise-level financial system based on Indiana University’s Financial Information System (FIS). Kuali’s initial product, the Kuali Financial System (KFS), incorporates the baseline FIS functionality and approved enhancements, in what has become the Kuali mold: a collaborative approach to design, an open development platform, and a web-based operating environment.
After receiving a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Kuali turned its teams of functional experts and developers drawn from participating institutions to building KFS. Kuali has had three releases to date: Kuali Test Drive demonstration in March 2006, Release 1.0 in October 2006 and Release 2.0 in November 2007. The final release of the baseline functionality, release 3.0 is scheduled to be completed and available December 2008.
An important element of Kuali software is its modular architecture. Institutions may implement only those functional elements they need. The KFS can be scaled in turn for complex, multi-campus, research-intensive institutions as well as smaller private, liberal arts, or community colleges.
KFS also takes full advantage of Kuali RICE. The Kuali Rice effort provides an enterprise class middleware suite of integrated products that allows both Kuali and non-Kuali applications to be built in an agile fashion, such that developers are able to react to end-user business requirements in an efficient and productive manner, so that they can produce high quality business applications.
The community source nature of the work gives Information Technology professionals the ability to engage collaboratively in continuous improvement and innovation in the Kuali applications. They can give web-based KFS tools to their entire user communities that conveniently execute their college and university responsibilities. At the same time, the KFS provides program managers and administrators with ready access to current information for analysis and decision-making. Please take a look under the tabs above for more information. In particular, Kuali contact information is available under Contact Us.