About the City of Lakeway
The City of Lakeway, Texas, serves roughly 20,000 residents. Like many cities, its finance team was running the entire budget out of spreadsheets with broken links, no real version control, and a personnel budget built more on estimation than calculation. Three years ago, the city implemented Euna Budget for budgeting, personnel modeling, and the OpenBook transparency tool.
The Challenge
- Excel-based budgeting left the city with no reliable version control, forcing manual updates across every file whenever budget decisions changed mid-year.
- Personnel budgeting for the police department was especially difficult, with certification pay, step programs, and mid-year hires creating variables that spreadsheets couldn’t handle accurately.
- Department directors had no direct access to their own budget data and had to contact finance every time they needed an update, adding up to a significant drain on the team’s time.
“I came from the private sector where everything’s PDFs, scanned, everything. No more paper, no more binders, no more hole punches. When I started here, I felt like I was back in 1997 at my first job.”
— Jodi Lehman-Wills, Budget Analyst and Grant Coordinator, City of Lakeway, TX
The Solution
Euna Budget gave Lakeway one place to build, track, and update the budget, and brought the rest of the organization into the process for the first time.
- Actuals pulled directly from the city’s ERP and uploaded daily, so the budget-to-actual picture is current every morning
- Personnel modeling tools built to handle pay modifiers, step programs, and partial-year hires accurately
- OpenBook gave every department direct access to their own budget detail and expenditure data, without going through finance
- Budget Academy brought directors into the system to enter their own budget requests, with almost no follow-up questions for the finance team
- File and note attachments let departments document their decisions and leave context for the next budget cycle
“This year was the first year I actually let people into Euna Budget besides us in finance. They were able to go in and enter their own budget this year. I had no questions. It was easy. The feedback was amazing from all my directors.”
— Jodi Lehman-Wills
Results
- When a major mid-year budget change required updates across the organization, the finance team completed the revisions in about an hour. The same work would have taken a full week in Excel.
- Personnel projections came in remarkably close to actual year-end figures, a level of accuracy that genuinely surprised the budget analyst.
- Directors stopped routing questions to finance because OpenBook gave them direct answers, freeing the team from fielding routine inquiries during budget season.
- With less time spent on corrections and maintenance, the finance team shifted from reactive firefighting to proactive planning.
“Instead of putting out fires, now we can actually start planning with Euna Budget. If you do not have budget software, get one.”
– Jodi Lehman-Wills
Conclusion
OpenBook is live internally, and the next step is making it public. The goal is for residents to see budget-to-actual data themselves with enough detail to understand what it takes to keep the city running.
“My goal this year is to be as transparent and accountable to our budget as we can. I don’t think the general population understands everything that goes into what a city has to take care of. I want to do more visualizations with Euna Budget so people can follow along.”
— Jodi Lehman-Wills, Budget Analyst and Grants Coordinator, City of Lakeway, TX