What this is
Schaeffer Operations is a single dashboard for the Center's budget, spending, personnel, and people data. It reads live workbooks from OneDrive, so the numbers update whenever those files change — there is nothing to install or refresh manually.
Getting in & access levels
Sign in with your USC account — there is no separate password. Access is enforced by OneDrive folder permissions: what you can see depends on which of the dashboard's OneDrive folders are shared with you.
- Standard access — granted by access to the dashboard's DATA folder. Full use of every tab, but individual salary and pay figures stay blurred (aggregate totals and counts only).
- Salary access — granted by additional access to the separate Salaries folder. Everything above, plus the ability to unblur individual salary, effort-dollar, and bonus figures.
If the DATA folder isn't shared with your account, you'll see an "access denied" screen. To be added — or to upgrade to salary access — ask the Schaeffer Center to share the relevant OneDrive folder with you. Changes take effect the next time you load the dashboard.
Please keep pay data confidential and don't share screenshots of unblurred figures.
Managing access (admin): access is controlled entirely by OneDrive sharing — share or unshare the DATA folder (dashboard access) and the Salaries folder (salary tier). There is no password or allowlist to edit. The two are sibling folders, not nested, so the shares are independent — but anyone given Salaries must also be given DATA, or they'll be denied at the gate before the salary tier is ever checked.
Fiscal Year selector
The red FY dropdown in the header switches the whole dashboard between years. FY27 is the current budget projection; FY26 and earlier (FY25–FY21) show actuals from that year's Account Details workbook. Some tabs are FY27-only and will note the year they cover.
The tabs
- 🏠 Home — summary cards (total, personnel, indirects), a Spending-by-FY bar chart (with an Excl. subawards toggle that nets pass-through funding out of the actuals years), then Spending by Category & Activity (chart or table view, with Copy for PowerPoint). The table view adds a % YoY column — change vs the prior fiscal year, shown as “—” when that year isn't in the workbook. The Active Staff and Active Faculty cards are clickable: click either one to list the people behind the number, with each person's activities, effort %, and FTE, plus the source workbook the names came from.
- Effort — effort %, FTE, and dollar allocations by person × activity (FY27 budget), with a cost/effort toggle and fringe slider.
- Personnel Costs — per-employee, per-account salary detail. Switch between By Person, By Account, and By Activity, or filter to a single account.
- Other Costs — Scholars, Research Commitments, Travel, M&S, Data, and Other (FY27 budget).
- Bonuses — bonus amounts by person across FY24–FY27.
- Accounts — every GF/PR/PG account with its short name, activity, PI, total spending, and the latest fiscal year it appears in. Has its own FY, Activity, and PI filters.
- VPD — VPD floorplan cards.
- People — combined directory of Staff, Faculty, GRA, Postdocs, Scholars, and Advisory Board, sourced from the Staff Tracker.
- Discrepancies — cross-checks each person across Budget, HR, LinkedIn, and the Schaeffer website, with "missing" filters.
Salaries & privacy
The Blur salaries checkbox hides individual dollar figures, showing ●●● instead. With salary access you can toggle it freely; with standard access it stays locked on. Aggregate totals and counts always remain visible, as do effort percentages and FTE counts (on the Effort Table and the Personnel Costs By Person view) — those are ratios, not dollars.
Filtering & sorting
Most tables have clickable column headers to sort, plus dropdown filters (Activity, PI, FY, Account) depending on the tab. Click a header again to reverse the order.
Editing & saving
On the Accounts tab you can edit an account's name or activity inline. Those edits are saved in your browser only (local storage) — they don't change the OneDrive files and aren't shared with other users.
Source files
Each tab shows a Source Files box naming the exact OneDrive workbook(s) the data came from, so you can always trace a number back to its origin.
Handy tips
- Copy for PowerPoint on the Home tab copies the donut chart or table for pasting into slides.
- The header links (Workday, OneDrive, Box, Concur, Cayuse) open the relevant USC systems in a new tab. OneDrive is the DATA folder the dashboard actually reads; Box is the old DATA folder, kept for reference since the dashboard no longer reads it.
- Press Esc or click outside this window to close it.
