Are you thinking of enhancing up your budget, increasing interdepartmental collaboration, increasing transparency, and streamlining the budget process? Let’s explore how it can be done effectively. The City of Ukiah received one of the 2020 CSMFO Innovation Awards for its online interactive budget document. The budget document can be found here. Craig Boyer, Assistant Controller at the County of Alameda, spoke with Daniel Buffalo, Finance Director at the City of Ukiah, to find out more about the City’s innovation.

Preparation of the Budget

1. What financial software does the City use and is it integrated with the budget software?
The City uses Tyler Munis and OpenGov. OpenGov integrated the two for us.

2. How long did it take to enter the budget information?
It varied depending on the Story we were creating. The most time-consuming part was to copy and paste the narrative from departments and to format the information for the OpenGov software. It took one person a few weeks to complete roughly 52 divisions. The next step was to create the views/URL and populate the charts. On average, it took 30-45 minutes to complete one division.

3. How involved are all departments in the City to gather narratives for the executive summaries?
Departments are responsible for their own narratives on the department pages. The Finance Department and the City Manager’s Office provide comments and requests for revisions, but ownership of the narrative remains with each department. For the executive summaries, departments are only responsible for their specific sections and the City Manager’s office or the Finance Department completes the rest of the summary.

4. How do the charts change in the document? Are they uploaded into the software? If so, what software is used to develop the charts?
The charts are interactive, meaning you can hover above the colored section of the chart and it will give high level information. If you click on the chart, it will take you to the report where you can easily drill down into more detail. Also, information can be displayed readily in more than one type of chart, and each chart is drillable.

The charts are part of the OpenGov platform and are generated from Excel datasets that we upload from our ERP. We used an application by OpenGov called Stories to develop each page of our budget. Each webpage is a story. OpenGov Stories provides layout options and tools to present narrative, tables, charts, and graphs in one location that are linked to reports we produce in OpenGov from the uploaded Excel datasets. We used a combination of OpenGov template chart formats and internally designed charts. The software even allows for the incorporation of other outside sources of information.

5. How many employees work on the budget and what positions do they hold?
We were able to delegate out much of the work to individual departments. We have 49 employees that have a role to play in developing the budget. There are 10 executives, 24 managers, and 15 supporting team members. The central budget team that coordinated and produced the final document was comprised of four individuals: Finance Director, Budget Manager, Budget Technician, and an analyst.

Notification and Distribution of the Budget

1. Does the software track how many people view the online budget document?
Yes, it does through our transparency portal. You can also view the number of visitors within 7, 30 or 90 days, average visit durations, visits per day, top 5 locations, top 5 URL references, and new vs returning visitors.

2. How did the City’s citizens react to not having a paper copy of the budget?
We have received wonderfully positive feedback from our citizens. They seem to enjoy being able to review the information online with interactive charts. Our City Council seems at ease with its use and comfortable with how the software presents information. Any user can review the areas of our budget that interest them and get a level of detail that has not been available in an easy to read format. In prior years, users would come into the City’s offices to dig through 500-1,000 pages of paper or pdf supporting documentation. The City has not received any negative community feedback regarding the change in the presentation of the budget document.

Applicability of the Innovation to Other Local Governments

1. What elements of the City’s online budget document can be broadly applied by other local governments? Provide an estimate of the commitment of government resources to implement these elements.
We used this software in a way not originally contemplated by OpenGov. It was relatively easy to configure and use the software to meet our desired presentation format. Our templates, presentation, and techniques are available to all who use OpenGov software. The City is happy to share its resources with other CSMFO members.

The City was able to reduce the number of hours worked on the budget document from 2,188 to 1,591 hours, a savings of 597 hours and a reduction of staff time spent on the budget by 27%. This time savings translated into staff savings of $81,706 on budget document preparation, which allowed staff to focus their resources on other City tasks.

2. Discuss any additional improvements that the City has made to the online budget document since submission to the CSMFO Awards Program.
The City has not had to make any improvements to the document since submission; however, we are refining our process and presentation for the next fiscal year. What is even cooler about this presentation is that it is live. The actual revenues and expenditures recorded during the fiscal year update daily. Next fiscal year, we intend to integrate budget appropriation changes regularly as well. The budget will become a true living document.

Also, we are in the process of developing our budget in OpenGov’s new Budget Builder application as the next step to streamlining our budget process, moving away entirely from entering budget data into our ERP. All entry, analysis, and revision will be done through Budget Builder and the final numbers exported to the ERP through an integration tool. We have a volunteer-based pilot program this year to develop the platform and work out the kinks. Next year we will be implementing it city-wide. Also, we are refining our CIP budget and reporting through OpenGov. This gives citizens and City Council members real live data to view projects and their status whenever they choose and not have to wait for a paper budget document that is published once a year.