What this is
Schaeffer Operations is a single dashboard for the Center's budget, spending, personnel, and people data. It reads live workbooks from Box, so the numbers update whenever those files change — there is nothing to install or refresh manually.
Getting in & access levels
The opening screen asks for a password. There are two levels of access:
- Standard access — full use of every tab, but all salary and individual-pay figures stay blurred and counts only.
- Salary access — everything above, plus the ability to unblur individual salary, effort-dollar, and bonus figures.
If you're on standard access and open a salary-gated view, you'll be prompted for the salary password. Use Forgot password? on the login screen to send an access request.
Please keep these passwords confidential and don't share screenshots of unblurred pay data.
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, then Spending by Category & Activity (chart or table view, with Copy for PowerPoint).
- 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.
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 Box files and aren't shared with other users.
Source files
Each tab shows a Source Files box naming the exact Box 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, Box, Concur, Cayuse) open the relevant USC systems in a new tab.
- Press Esc or click outside this window to close it.
