UC Santa Cruz

The Situation

The College of Physical and Biological Sciences at UC Santa Cruz administers undergraduate and graduate studies across math and the sciences for the university. For years, the college ran its annual budgeting process on a well-known custom software platform, until the university’s IT services team phased that platform out. Without a supported replacement, the admin team fell back to spreadsheets. What followed was months of administrative strain: less control over the numbers, real data security gaps, and small departmental changes that made workflows nearly impossible to reconcile across the division.

What We Built

Beezwax built open-source, bespoke web software for the college, with single sign-on giving every user a unique, trackable identity, and the full annual budgeting logic built directly into the application. The team’s first instinct was to bring back the platform they’d lost, but a WCAG accessibility review ruled that out, so a browser-based experience compatible with screen readers became a core design requirement from day one.

The budget was fixed, so Beezwax leaned on agentic development to keep the build on track. An accelerated, grant-funded timeline meant Beezwax stepped in with director-level advisory and hands-on project management, running recurring standups across design, development, and QA directly with the college’s champions.

What Changed

About thirty department managers now use the platform to submit academic plans, secure funding, request teaching assistants, and sequence classes so students graduate on schedule. Change logs and unique user IDs have replaced the guesswork of the spreadsheet era, and a budget reconciliation process that once took months now wraps up in weeks.

The bigger shift has been in how the college thinks about the tool itself. What started as a fix for a broken budgeting process has become the foundation for a longer roadmap, with future modules already planned for teaching assistant management, machine learning assisted scheduling, and a full graduate student success platform, all made possible by the academic planning core built first.