City of Walnut Creek ACFR Project

The Challenge

Before we connected with the finance team at the City of Walnut Creek, California, they were mired in endless manual data entry and reconciliations. All of their statements and documents were housed in Word and Excel. Spreadsheets were riddled with inconsistent formulas and hard-coded numbers devoid of explanation. Hidden rows contained legacy data that affected totals. There were human errors aplenty.

The team struggled to maintain consistent formatting throughout the report, ensure rounding uniformity, and catch discrepancies between fund statements and balance sheets. 

Only one person on the team had access to the Excel workbook that included all of the statements. That person left, leaving the team at a real disadvantage. It was nearly impossible for them to determine where any of the financial statement or notes table data came from. And they had no documentation of any ACFR preparation process steps. 

The Implementation

FHB stepped in to evaluate the City’s challenges and determine the best available solution to help overcome them. 

Did you know?
Out of the box, reporting automation software can boost productivity to some
degree, but public sector organizations often fail to reap the full benefits of
their technology investments. That’s why FHB leverages deep accounting
and technical expertise to develop public-sector extensions on top of
existing platforms, and why CPAs with public sector experience lead
our implementations—for maximum productivity improvement.

The FHB team, led by Principal Consultant Faith Olanipekun, CPA, helped the City automate much of its ACFR preparation process, using leading industry platform Workiva, enhanced by our proprietary public sector data model. “The implementation was both efficient and informative,” said Kirsten LaCasse, Administrative Services Director for the City.

The Results

With the implementation complete, Kirsten and her team immediately recognized its value. “Before, it took one full-time employee about half of her time throughout the year, and all of her time for part of the year, to prepare the ACFR manually,” said Kirsten.  

All told, FHB’s implementation of Workiva will save the City’s team roughly, “1,000 staff hours per year, maybe a little bit more,” Kirsten said. “This year, we were able to submit our ACFR one month earlier than in previous years. We got it in before Thanksgiving for the first time ever. Our staff is now able to focus on the actual GL entries and notes without rushing,” she said. 

What’s more, the team can, “confidently say where every number comes from and how it ties to the trial balance,” said Kirsten. And FHB’s implementation makes proper rounding and identification of discrepancies a breeze. 

 “All of our journals are tracked and easy to provide to auditors. Our presentation of information is more professional and consistent, and our frustrations are dramatically diminished,” she said. 

“The elimination of simple human errors will inevitably increase
 the level of confidence our Council and community have in our staff.”

Looking ahead, the Walnut Creek team is considering including the SEFA (Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards) as part of the ACFR, rather than creating a separate document. “It could certainly help us, when we’re preparing to bring the ACFR to Council, to have the SEFA somehow incorporated,” said Kirsten. We’re also talking about doing a PAFR (Popular Annual Financial Report), but we haven’t gotten that far yet,” she said.  

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