NSU implemented a performance-based budgeting system in 1998. Performance-based budget systems depict projected accomplishments for each dollar spent and enable institutional decision-makers to make comparisons to standard benchmarks, best practices, and/or other similar educational institutions.

NSU's performance-based budget system facilitates integration of performance planning with the budget process, providing an effective management tool for administrative decision making and ensuring a direct association between institutional mission and vision, budgeting, planning, and institutional assessment. The system not only informs the resource allocation decisions that are an integral part of the budget process, but reveals through its implementation an approximation of how budget allocations are translated into results.

NSU has continued to refine the system since its inception. Projected enhancement of system capacity will enable administrative decision-makers to assess budget activity by program area, evaluate how dollars fund day-to-day tasks and activities, how these activities are expected to generate certain outputs, and what outcomes should then be the result.