Jeff Goldstein, Sr. Director, Business Product Management – Euna Budget
With a passion for driving transformative technology solutions, Jeff leads the Budget Product Line for Euna Solutions. Jeff has a proven track record in leading high-performing teams and delivering exceptional software solutions that exceed customer expectations.
In our previous Budget Book Studio blogs, we explored the game-changing features of Budget Book Studio, from ensuring accessibility for everyone to providing industry-leading print capabilities whenever you need a physical copy of your budget book. Now, we’re excited to introduce one of Euna Budget’s latest innovations: Scaffolding, an automation tool designed to streamline the creation of your budget book by auto-generating content. This transformative feature significantly reduces the manual effort and time needed to compile, format, and update your budget book, allowing your team to focus more on strategic initiatives.
What is Scaffolding?
Scaffolding is a powerful automation feature designed to simplify and streamline the creation of your digital budget book. Unlike typical financial publishing platforms that operate as basic CMSs without purpose-built tools, Scaffolding is purpose-built specifically for budget teams. It allows for the templated and automated production of pages, saving time and reducing repetitive work. By integrating templates with your data, Scaffolding automatically generates content for standard sections like department pages, fund summaries, and capital project sheets.
This feature is particularly valuable for pages with consistent formats, such as department pages. These pages can include elements like department titles, missions, previous year’s accomplishments, and visualizations, such as headcount pie charts or budget bar graphs. The automation ensures that every page is accurate and visually consistent, making the budget team’s job significantly easier and more efficient compared to the generic, one-size-fits-all approach of other platforms.
The Benefits of Scaffolding
Municipalities often have numerous departments, resulting in hundreds of repetitive pages in the budget book. Creating this content can be tedious and time-consuming, as many sections share a similar layout with consistent information, differing only in department-specific details. Scaffolding automates this process by allowing you to create a template for each section and populate it with the relevant data.
This automation significantly reduces the manual effort required, saving valuable time that can be redirected toward more strategic tasks. By ensuring consistency and accuracy across all pages, Scaffolding minimizes errors and discrepancies, maintaining the professionalism of the budget book.
Creating Pages with Scaffolding
In this example, we’ll use the creation of division pages.
- Set Up and Integration: Begin by setting up your data in Euna Budget Professional. Since Budget Book Studio is fully integrated with Euna Budget, you can easily pull the division data into Budget Book Studio. Simply select the data set you want to use, in this case, the division data.
- Template Creation: Build a single template that includes all necessary elements, such as headings, paragraphs, and budget breakdowns by cost center. This template serves as the foundation for all Division pages.
- Automation and Consistency: With Scaffolding, once you’ve designed the template, it automatically applies to every Division page. This means any update or change made to the template—such as adjusting the layout or adding a new section—will instantly reflect across all related pages, ensuring consistency and accuracy without the need for manual updates.
- Effortless Page Generation: After setting up your template, simply click the Scaffold button. Scaffolding generates all Division pages, which are pre-populated with the relevant data and content. Each page can still be reviewed and fine-tuned as needed, but the bulk of the work is already done, saving you significant time and effort.
- Time Saved: This streamlined approach ensures uniformity and reduces errors, saving the budget team hours of work and providing a seamless and efficient user experience. What will you do with all that time you’ve just saved?!
Scaffolding in Action
As you’ve seen, Scaffolding is an invaluable tool for budget teams. By creating a template just once, Scaffolding pulls in the correct content and data to populate all similar pages instantly. While our example used a simple template, you can create more complex and detailed ones that include revenues, funding, headcounts, FTEs, and other critical budget information. This automation takes the tedious, repetitive tasks off your plate, freeing up time for you and your team to focus on strategic initiatives that make a real difference in your community.
Imagine all the extra hours you can spend brainstorming new projects, engaging with stakeholders, or even just taking a well-deserved break. With Scaffolding, you can streamline your workflow and make budget book creation a breeze. Stay tuned for more exciting updates and features in Budget Book Studio. We’re committed to making your experience in crafting digital budget books as efficient and engaging as possible, ultimately enriching the way your community interacts with your published documents.
Learn more about Scaffolding and Budget Book Studio by Euna Budget.