Pinellas County Clerk's Office ACFR Automation

The Challenge

In sunny Pinellas County, Florida, situated on a 280-square-mile peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, Bill Seiter serves as Assistant Director for the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller’s Finance Division.   
 
Back in 2018, Bill and his team engaged the help of FHB to implement the best available tool for improving their Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) preparation process. Since then, everything has changed—the report’s size and complexity, as well as the technology available to automate the process. Although the desktop program FHB implemented in 2018 was a major improvement over their prior solution, by 2024, it could no longer support the team’s growing needs.  
 
The old program was complicated and required a great deal of time to set up and maintain each year, ultimately creating additional work for the team. They also found basic actions, like formatting, unnecessarily difficult.   
 
By March of 2023, Bill and his team were ready for a better solution. They reached out to FHB, once again, for help selecting and implementing the right tool to further streamline preparation of their annual report, in light of their changing needs.  
 
“We were looking forward to something a little more user-friendly,” Bill said. His team also sought to better leverage the native capabilities of a new platform. And finally, they wanted a tool that would allow collaboration, so that multiple team members could work on various sections of the report simultaneously.   
 
After considering available options, the Pinellas team elected to implement Workiva, with the support and guidance of Workiva Elite Partner and public sector specialist, FHB.  

The Implementation

Out of the box, Workiva serves as a solid, blank, foundational platform, upon which FHB developed many Public Sector Extensions that enable a faster, more robust implementation; provide enhanced functionality; and maximize automation. FHB’s central extension is a Public Sector Data Model, which includes pre-built tables, queries, chains, and scripts. It can be paired with other extensions to streamline, automate, and simplify workpapers, rounding, adjusting journal entries, data validation, GASB pronouncement automation,  Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards (SEFA) automation, and more.  

How It Went

From the kickoff meeting, to importing the County’s data into Workiva, to replicating their prior year ACFR, the implementation took just 14 weeks.   
 
“The project was managed really well,” said Bill. FHB Principal Consultant Joy Richardson, CPA, led the implementation initially, followed by Principal Consultant Faith Olanipekun, CPA. “Faith got up to speed quickly. They both seemed to really know [the old software] as well as Workiva,” he said.  
 
The Clerk’s office was impressed by the responsiveness of Joy, Faith, and the entire team. “They were available and responded to questions within a day, usually within a few hours,” said Justin Hansen, Senior Manager–General Accounting & Reporting. 

“From my perspective, the implementation was fantastic.”

–Bill Seiter, Assistant Director

How It's Going

To get a true sense of project outcomes, we regularly follow up with our clients once they complete their first reporting cycle with Workiva. Like all of our clients, Pinellas was highly satisfied with their results.  
 
“The collaboration was there, especially for the first year, when everybody’s getting used to the software. It was easy to use, and we were done about a week earlier than we were last year. Considering we switched both auditors and software, it turned out really well,” Bill said.   
 
“Workiva was definitely easier for staff to understand and train on. It's more native to what they know in Word and Excel, and there’s better communication,” he added.  

“Workiva is awesome. And having a foundation in Excel
makes it super easy to use.  So, I love it.”

–Shpresa Zenku, Senior Finance Accountant 

“It's very risky to have just one or two people who know how to use software that's so important for your process. Workiva gives our staff the opportunity to get more into the preparation. It's a learning tool, it’s a ‘spread out the work’ tool. So, it's not all concentrated on one person. I'm pretty happy with it from that perspective,” Bill said. “Last year (in the old program), it was just me…making all the updates. This year, we had all our accountants here. And we even got our analysts in there helping as well, with the statistical sections,” Justin added.

Looking Ahead

The Pinellas Clerk’s team expects to see added time savings during future ACFR preparation cycles. “Now that we've been through a year and were able to make tweaks needed after initial setup—we found some input values that we should have linked and automated, so we’ve made those updates—going forward, I think we're really going to see the time savings,” said Justin.  
 
They’re also keeping an eye out for other automation opportunities. “We used our reconciliations worksheet created last year as our source for the reconciling document. So, we can automate and continue improving that,” Justin added.  
 
Soon after completion of their ACFR automation project, FHB helped the Pinellas Clerk’s team update their implementation to include the groupings needed for its federally mandated SEFA report.   

Bill and his team are so happy with the level of support and care provided by FHB, they’ve volunteered to spread the word. “If you have prospective clients, I’m happy to be a reference,” he said.