Frederick County, MD Unifies and Automates the Budget Book

Frederick County Unifies Budget Book Pieces Under Comprehensive Solution

The Challenge

Frederick County's, Budget Department faced a challenge common to Public Sector organizations when preparing its Budget Book. They spent countless hours gathering and reconciling various pieces across multiple applications. There were pieces in Questica Budget, Excel, and Word, and they presented it in Adobe. To ensure confidence in the data, every change or update would require 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

The County's solution was to replace Microsoft and 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.  

1. Discovery - What are the County's wants and needs?
2. Scope - Defining project parameters
3. Planning - Working backward from the project goal to define a timeline and assign tasks
4. Configuration  - Configure the selected solution to meet the County's needs
5. Training - Provide training to the County's budget team in the use of their new tools
6. Management - Weekly meetings and communication to ensure the project stays on track
7. Completion - Mutual agreement that the scope of the project has been fulfilled
8. 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.

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.