Marion County Clerk
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)Marion County prepares three publish-ready budget books in just eight hours Project: Budget Book Automation Organization: Marion County Clerk Solutions: Caseware Working Papers + custom scripting Budget Book: 2022-23 Adopted Line-Item Budget 2022/23 - 2026/27 Adopted CIP Success Story: Marion County With a team of five people and a billion-dollar budget, Marion County has always relied on technology to do more with less and do it quickly. Having worked first with GovMax, then with Tyler Munis for budget creation, the group decided that Munis’ budget-book automation capabilities were insufficient. To extend its capabilities such that its output would meet the needs of the county commissioner would require $150,000 worth of customization. Unprepared to pay the initial and any ongoing costs for subsequent updates and changes, the team started looking for alternatives. The whole package The team was introduced to Caseware and F.H. Black & Company Incorporated (FHB). Out of the box, the Caseware solution had much of what the county was looking for. And they soon learned that the public sector experts at FHB would fill in the gaps, making it the perfect solution for their organization. We interviewed Audrey Fowler, budget director at Marion County, to learn more about the project. Why not just use spreadsheets? Every day, we speak with finance and budget departments that still prepare their financial reports using some combination of spreadsheets, word processors, and publishing tools. Having made it our mission to replace these disjointed programs with purpose-built, database-driven solutions, we are always curious as to why organizations choose spreadsheets. So, when we asked Audrey why she chose not to use spreadsheets, we found that she was a kindred spirit, and her fear was real. It's a fear that our team of principal consultants knows all too well and has experienced firsthand during their time in public sector finance and budget departments: the fear that one or more of the thousands of points of entry is incorrect—that errors have propagated throughout the reports and that they’ve missed them. ”I would never dream of publishing a book from an Excel file, not at 700 pages.” Audrey Fowler, budget director at Marion County Clerk Automation by necessity In public sector finance and budget departments, obtaining buy-in, allocating budget, and setting aside time for an IT project is always challenging. And even when all of these things are in place, IT projects often fail, resulting in wasted time and money. More importantly, project failures drain enthusiasm for change. With the difficulty and risk involved, it's no wonder many organizations are hesitant to take on the challenge, despite the rewards of a successful project. When we asked Audrey about the county's decision-making process, it was immediately apparent that the budget team was very motivated and that this project was a means to an end. "I don’t have 40 hours to spend in a week on putting the book together... I have to spend the money on the automation, the technology to get things done. Otherwise, I can’t get my job done." Getting exactly what you want Audrey was no stranger to IT projects. She had versed herself in available and suitable solutions and knew what she wanted. She also knew that, to meet her needs precisely and guarantee optimal execution, she needed an implementation specialist. Audrey wanted a two-step process for preparing a visually appealing and accurate book: 1. Import data. 2. Click three buttons to generate the books. Using the FHB method, complemented by custom scripting, Marion County got exactly what it wanted and needed. "The implementation was fantastic, very responsive... I was a little skeptical at first, but [FHB] made a believer out of me, and it worked!” What does preparing your budget books look like today? "All three books are fully scripted... It's an eight-hour workday, start to finish." For more on this project, read the full story.
Some guidance and custom scripting is all it took to enable the dedicated team at Marion County Clerk to prepare 3 Budget Books of more than 1,000 pages in only 8 hours, start to finish.
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Deschutes County
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)Deschutes County Made Massive Efficiency Gains in Minimal Time with Only Moderate Guidance Project: Budget Automation Organization: Deschutes County Population: 204,801 (2021) Solutions: Workiva Wdesk & Wdata Budget Book: 2022 Adopted Budget Book Success Story: Deschutes County With a single automation project, the Deschutes County, Oregon finance and budget department team reduced its budget book preparation time by 60-65% in year one and anticipate greater efficiency gains in the coming years. Like many public sector organizations, the county's finance department was plagued by inefficient business processes and inadequate tools, tempering their ability to commit sufficient time to higher-value tasks like long-term forecasting. The Search Deschutes County enlisted the help of the experts at F.H. Black & Company Incorporated. Working together, they reviewed the county's existing processes, identified areas for improvement, generated a list of requirements, and assessed the qualifying solutions. "We looked at quite a few solutions, probably 8 or 9 different platforms over 6 to 7 months... FHB answered all our questions and steered us in the right direction." Daniel Emerson, Budget Manager at Deschutes County The Right Solution - Workiva After carefully assessing their requirements and stringently reviewing industry-leading solutions for the best fit, the county opted for Workiva. A combination of Wdesk and Wdata gave the county a robust cloud-based automation solution that enabled the seamless collaboration of all contributors to the book. The intuitive and familiar interface of Wdesk enables the team to instantly generate automated reports and create custom data sets and calculations in seconds. "We absolutely love Workiva! Right now, there’s an over 50% probability that at some point in the next year, we will reach out and talk about an ACFR implementation. We'll recommend F.H. Black for that as well.” FHB's Guided-Self Implementation Having selected Workiva as their reporting automation solution, it was time for the county to implement, configure, and optimize the solution for their environment. Workiva's seemingly limitless potential and plethora of features meant that if the county wanted to optimally implement the solution to maximize automation and collaboration, they would benefit from expert help. The question was, how much help? As no two organizations, finance departments, or implementations are the same, FHB offers its clients many options. Implementations are scoped, packaged, and priced based on the client's requirements, budget, and availability to contribute to the project. The county was offered a sliding scale of services. On one side, you have a delegated implementation. This option would see the county delegate the implementation to the CPAs at FHB. They would have to provide a little information, but almost all of the work would be completed by the team at FHB. This is the most expensive option; it requires very little input from the county and is fast. On the other side of the scale, there is the guided-self implementation. This is the least expensive option and designates most of the work to the team at the county. FHB provides initial infrastructure setup, training, guidance, and any additional custom development work requested. Confident in their ability and availability to self-implement the solution with guidance from FHB, the county opted for a guided-self implementation. Besides the cost, this option has the added benefit of including the county's team in just about every step of the implementation process, resulting in the team having familiarity and knowledge of the solution that they otherwise would not. The county also knew that they could always approach FHB for additional services if they ran into a problem. “I think that this project by the end of July would have already paid for itself”. Next year and beyond No matter how you measure it, the county's budget automation project was a huge success. As a result, the county can declare in no uncertain terms that it has massively improved the efficiency, reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of its budget preparation process, with far-reaching implications for the budget team, the department, the organization, and the community. For more on this project, read the full story.
Deschutes County reduced its budget book preparation time by 60-65% in year one and anticipate greater efficiency gains in the coming years. Learn how they made massive efficiency gains with only moderate guidance.
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Chicago Public Schools
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)Chicago Public Schools saved hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars in ACFR preparation costs The Challenge Project: ACFR Automation Organization: Chicago Public Schools Population: 636 Schools with 340,658 Students Solutions: Workiva Wdesk & Wdata ACFR: 2021 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report Success Story: Chicago Public Schools The dedicated team at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) was fighting a losing battle. A combined one thousand hours of overtime was not enough to prevent missed deadlines, extension requests, and reporting errors. The problem was clear; manually generating the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) with generic tools was extremely inefficient. "We could not provide the report on time. We tried, and we couldn’t turn it around quick enough to meet our board meeting timeline." Manual Overload Using Word and Excel to prepare the ACFR's contents and then compiling it into a PDF meant that nearly every word, number, graph, and chart in the organization's 214-page report had to be manually keyed in. In addition, any time a modification was made, it was down to the finance team to ensure that all associated information was updated in all applicable locations. Not only was this process time-consuming, it left lots of room for errors to creep into the report. Formatting to exhaustion Formatting the ACFR is not something often thought about outside the finance department, but those who generate it know it's a monumental task of great importance. A poorly formatted report is challenging to follow, invokes doubt, invites misinterpretation, and often results in poor planning/decision making. For finance departments with inadequate tools, formatting represents a relative black hole of lost time. Typically, financial reports are not simply formatted once. Every seemingly insignificant change results in another round of review, spacing, page number changes, table-of-content updates, chart and graph modifications—the list goes on and on. "We had a hard time dealing with formatting issues for our report. It took soo long! That's time I should have spent on other areas, but instead, we have to figure out how to correct formatting issues in the PDF...If we wanted to have a 3rd party compile the report, it cost more than $30,000." One review, two review, three review, more. The highly manual nature of the organization's ACFR preparation meant that the report had to be constantly reviewed and validated. Updating a balance or text didn't just mean modifying a cell in most cases; it could mean updating several cells, charts, graphs, and the MD&A to assure that all the data was correct and flowed the way it should. Then, they'd check over the formatting again—how the change affected margins, page numbers, images, etc. The worst part? The lingering doubt that accompanied the process: What if I missed something? Staff shortages "A main problem right now for the whole country, not only for school districts or state and local government, is a shortage of staff. It’s harder to maintain staff, and one of my solutions is to use a lot of automation. That way, we can reduce a lot of unnecessary work, and we don’t have to rely on so many staff." The Solution After reviewing several competitive solutions, including Gravity, CaseWare, and OneStream, as well as some offerings from smaller companies, CPS opted for Workiva's Wdesk and Wdata platforms. Wdesk serves as the organization's report writer, while Wdata is the database on the back end, driving automation. When asked what tilted the scales in Workiva's favor, Dongmei advised: "While some of the other solutions could accommodate our requirements for automating content and linkages, Workiva can also provide a very nice presentation, which is critical for us." The benefits didn't stop there. Dongmei continued to discuss the advantages of automation, fiscal and time savings, and improved collaboration with the auditor. Automation "I just need to set up one master worksheet and all the information flows to all the different worksheets; it’s done, it’s like a miracle happened. We saved so much time and headaches." "We don’t see a lot of errors now. Before, we would have errors because of technical issues. If we change something in one place, it's not automatically reflected in other areas; those types of errors happened all the time. This year because we are using this wonderful automation tool, we didn’t have this problem at all. It was a high-quality report. We were so happy about it." Fiscal and Time Savings "This software really saved us a lot of cost on the reporting piece, $30,000 at least... for a lot of other solutions, any time we need to change anything, we need to contact the vendor for support, and it becomes very costly." "We saved at least 500 hours; that’s minimum...I remember in 2020, I needed to work on the report to meet the timeline for the board meeting. I worked 30 hours straight to get the report done." The Audit "Communicating with the auditor was very easy. We could send them a single package with all of the supporting documentation. We didn’t need to send Excel documents back and forth...the auditor was really happy with the solution as well." The Implementation It's not the first time that Chicago Public Schools has attempted to implement a solution to automate its ACFR. An attempt was made in 2015, but the project never really got off the ground. The team at CPS credits the consultants and best practices of F.H. Black & Company Incorporated for the success of the implementation. "I have been involved with this kind of software implementation system upgrade for many, many years...when I started to go through the procurement process, I could never imagine it would have gone so smoothly, with this level of success." In conversation, Dongmei's auditor discussed another client who works with Workiva but had self-implemented. While Workiva was working for them, they were still working out the kinks and did not implement as many efficiencies as Chicago Public Schools had with FHB. "I feel like I am the lucky one. Thanks to F.H. Black, we did not have any issues, we met all our deadlines, and we are really confident in our solution. F.H. Black has the best consultants I have seen in my whole career. Not only are they IT experts, but they know the accounting side...I am a CPA and also a Certified Public Financial Officer, but I think our [FHB] consultant is a level above me." The Result "This project was really successful, but it's way bigger than that. If we failed, if we couldn't meet our deadline, or there were issues, or the auditor complained, I don't know how I could convince senior management to make other improvements that our team, that the whole organization needs. This project proved that we could successfully implement technology, and it's just the beginning. Now we have the confidence to work with F.H. Black to improve the whole finance department." For more on this project, read the full story.
Chicago Public Schools saved hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars in their Annual Comprehensive Financial Report preparation costs. We interviewed them to learn more.
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What a difference a year made for the City of Fort Wayne
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)The City of Fort Wayne cut budget book prep time by 75%. That's 300 hours! Project: Budget Book Automation Project Scope: Automate balances and narrative GFOA Budget Book Award compliance Replicate appearance of existing book Organization: City of Fort Wayne, IN Population: 265,752 (2019) Solutions: Workiva Wdesk & Wdata Budget Book: Operating Budget Book Success Story: City of Fort Wayne The Challenge When we first met the finance team at the City of Fort Wayne, they were using multiple disjointed systems to prepare their budget book. The budget department would bring balances from Excel into Munis, their ERP system. Any required changes would be manually keyed in there. The team would then run "really clunky" Crystal Reports and open them in Excel. Next, they pivoted the data by inputting appropriate parameters by fund and department. If a department like "police" had sub-departments (police admin, radio shop, records, etc.) any changes to a sub-department would require running a report at the sub-department level before running a department-level report. They then needed to review the reports for accuracy before going back to Excel for any updates. "Every time we made one little number change, it caused at least another 30-45 minutes worth of work." Kathleen Smith, Finance Manager at the City of Fort Wayne The Solution Having had great success with the reporting automation solution used to prepare the city's ACFR, the team opted for more of the same: Workiva's Wdata and Wdesk, customized and implemented with F.H. Black & Company Incorporated. What does the process look like now? Data is pulled from the City's ERP system and imported into Workiva. The budget book is then automatically populated with balances. All participants have the ability to access the system and provide their contributions. Any required changes are updated in a single location in Workiva; the book and all other applicable materials are automatically updated. Reports that would have taken hours to prepare now take moments, and data can be pivoted in an instant. "I just can't say enough about how much efficiency and accuracy improved." The Implementation After carefully considering the implementation service levels offered, the city contracted FHB to automate the budget book on a "guided-self" basis, with onboarding support. This meant keeping costs low, as Kathleen and her team would do the majority of the work under the guidance of FHB's experts, once they had completed the initial setup and customization. FHB assigned a team to work on the city's project and the work began. As with all FHB-led implementations, the initial kick-off meeting defined scope, assigned tasks/deadlines, and trained the city's team on using their project management tool. Next, FHB implemented a pre-built data model designed for public sector organizations, and built a connection from the city's ERP system. FHB recreated the prior year budget book template in Workiva, then set up basic sections and ten pages of linking to train the city's team. Next, we assisted the city with the tasks assigned to their team, including loading, tagging, and grouping imported data by object and function; building and linking schedules, notes, and statements; then reconciling, reviewing, and testing. "We had the budget book done probably a week earlier than we normally do, and that was while learning and implementing a whole new system." The Result The city achieved a 75% time savings while improving its budget book preparation process. Kathleen and her team now have robust, documented, and repeatable processes, making onboarding new team members a breeze. Having automated the ACFR and the expenditure budgets, the city is planning another project to automate the revenue side. "I was here a lot of evenings making sure everything looked right and tied together correctly. We didn't have that this year, I didn't find myself working any evenings or weekends." For more on this project, read the full story.
The city of Fort Wayne reduced their budget book preparation time by 300 hours, that's 75%! This is how they did it.
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Frederick County, MD Unifies and Automates the Budget Book
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)Frederick County Unifies All The Pieces Of The Budget Book Under A Comprehensive Solution Project: Budget Book Automation Organization: Frederick County, MD Population: 271,717 (2020 Census) Total Budgeted Revenues: $905 million Solution: Questica Budget Book powered by CaseWare Budget Book: Adopted Operating & Capital Budgets Success Story: Frederick County The Challenge Frederick County's, Budget Department faced a challenge common to Public Sector organizations when preparing the Budget Book. They spent countless hours gathering and reconciling pieces of their Budget Book across multiple applications. They had pieces in Questica Budget, pieces in Excel, pieces in Word, and they presented it in Adobe. To ensure confidence in the data, every change or update would require a time-consuming review. "Budget Book pieces were coming from every direction, that's what we had to solve" Tanya Kauffman, Budget Analyst III at Frederick County Government The Solution Replace Microsoft & Adobe with CaseWare and integrate it with Questica Budget. CaseWare hosts the Budget Book template and pulls balances and narratives directly from Questica. Any changes applied to the budget are made in Questica and flow straight through to all applicable locations in the book, facilitating greater confidence in the data and reducing the requirement for constant review and reconciliation. In addition, CaseWare's document management functionality allowed contributions from all parties to be stored and managed in a single location. The Project F.H. Black & Company Inc. assisted the team at Frederick County to implement the solution with the FHB method. Discovery - What are the County's wants and needs. Scope - Defining the parameters of the project. Planning - Working backward from the project goal to define a timeline and assign tasks. Configuration - Configure the selected solution to meet the County's needs. Training - Provide training to the County's budget team in the use of their new tools. Management - Weekly meetings and communication to ensure the project stays on track. Completion - Mutual agreement that the scope of the project has been completed. Ongoing Support - FHB continues to support and work with the County to improve and refine their processes. The Result The County has unified its piecemeal budget book under a single comprehensive solution resulting in increased confidence in the data and an estimated 25% reduction in the time it takes to complete budget book preparation processes. We asked Tanya if she has anything to add about the project. Here's what she had to say... For more on this project, read the full story.
Frederick County unifies and automates the budget book with a comprehensive solution for outstanding results.
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City of Garland Modernizes its Budget Processes
- Rachel Raymond
- Success Stories
- minute(s)The Forward-Thinking City of Garland Overcomes 3 Budget Challenges With 1 Project Project: Budget & Budget Book Preparation Organization: City of Garland, Texas Population: 239,928 (2019 Census) Annual Budget: $1.1 billion (Operating + CIP) Solution: Caseware & Questica Budget Book: Annual Operating Budget CIP: Capital Improvement Program Success Story: City of Garland The Challenge The city of Garland's Budget Department faced a trio of challenges that shared the same root cause: antiquated software solutions, and the business processes required to make them work. The city relied on legacy budget software to prepare the budget and a combination of Word, Excel, and Adobe to prepare the Capital & Operating Budget Books. The processes were slow, disjointed, and error-prone. The Solution After extensive research, the city's Budget Director, Allyson Bell Steadman decided on Questica Budget to prepare the budget, CaseWare to prepare the budget book, and F.H. Black & Company Inc. to integrate the two and ensure the budget book solution was optimally implemented to maximize their benefits and guarantee project success. The Project The implementation process was managed and guided by consultants from FHB. It started with a planning meeting, introduction to FHB's online project management tool, allocation of deliverables, and scheduling of software training. Once trained in the use of their new tools, the FHB team built the Capital Improvement Program budget book template based on the City's specifications. Once complete, a similar process was carried out for the Operating Budget Book. The Result By the end of the sixteen week implementation, the City was able to produce and publish both the proposed and adopted 2020-21 CIP & Operating Budget Books. The City now has a robust, documented, repeatable, and largely automated process for preparing their budget book. "The Budget & Research Department is in a much better position to produce and distribute budget documents. Our most recent success was having our 2021 Adopted CIP document finalized for publication on the City’s website and distribution to City Council two weeks after adoption". For more on this project, read the full success story here.
The City of Garland modernizes its Budget, Capital Improvement Program, and Annual Operating Budget Book preparation processes with a single project.
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