John,
At Birkbeck we have developed our own Planning Tool using Oracle APEX.
We did this to enable distributed / delegated planning with robust version control - to get away from the issues with large, complex Excel workbooks that you describe.
It is used by staff to plan student numbers, staff and non-pay.
Baseline data is loaded from the relevant source systems (SITS, Alta, Symmetry Blu-Cube respectively).
Planning is delegated to users across the college, e.g. programme owners view past recruitment performance as a guide, input their recrutiment targets for 2011/12 and projected fee and HEFCE + fee income is calculated.
You would be welcome to take a look at the development and we would consider allowing other parties to use it.
Nick Head
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