If you work in government, you know that the budget is the holy grail of your agency’s documents. Your budget not only determines where revenue is allocated and how it’s used but defines community priorities and outcomes, such as neighborhood development, public safety, infrastructure repair, and public education.
Unfortunately, it can also be fraught with insufficient resources, political promises, inter-departmental competition, and conflicting views of what your agency should and shouldn’t do for your residents.
The result? A budget process that favors short-term priorities over long-term planning, provides ineffective resolutions to community concerns, and uses an incremental approach to spending priorities that weakens community impact.
For your local government to achieve enhanced financial processes and a deeper community footprint, it may be time to break away from tradition and undertake a more streamlined approach.
Here are four keys to achieving budget success for your agency.
The 4 foundations of a supercharged budget:
1. Priority-based budgeting: Unlike traditional line-item budgets that base new financial strategies on previous decisions—regardless of their continued relevance or success—taking a priority-based approach to prepare and implement your budget puts your community’s needs first.
2. Strategic Planning: Developing a strategic, transparent plan that aligns with your agency’s budget can significantly impact your community. The key to successfully aligning budget and transparency is ensuring that your plan and execution cascade down from community-wide goals to definitive departmental action.
3. Greater transparency: Building trust within your community starts with transparency. Financial transparency solutions allow for seamless interaction with your agency’s financial information and data, affording your community an increased understanding of your local government’s decision-making.
4. Public engagement: The public’s expectations of your financial transparency, data accessibility, and participation are ever-growing. The most effective public engagement starts with creating a reciprocal, collaborative, and data-driven conversation with your residents.
Implementing a streamlined budgeting process within your agency is no cakewalk – but it’s very much attainable.
How Fort Worth, Texas revamped its budgeting processes
As one of the largest, fastest-growing cities in the US, Fort Worth, Texas needed to address some of the financial pressures that often accompany rapid change.
They needed a solution that would provide a seamless transition from manual spreadsheets and workflows to a modernized budgeting process, saving time and resources and allowing their budget team to focus on financial analytics and insights.
By implementing the suite of budgeting solutions by Questica, a Euna Solutions brand, Fort Worth has achieved an enhanced, cloud-based system that provides the city with streamlined processes, increased transparency, enhanced forecasting, and scenario planning that enable data-driven decisions.
A revamped budget, alongside good governance, equips your local government with the right tools to make informed decisions that prioritize your community.
If you’re ready to rethink your local government’s budgeting process, download our whitepaper, created in partnership with Balancing Act and Envisio, to discover an integrated, iterative, and transparent budgeting process that will elevate your agency’s financial success.