Parks Tacoma is not a typical parks department. As an independent special purpose government district in Washington state, it operates entirely separate from the City of Tacoma, with its own elected commissioners, its own property tax authority, and its own sprawling portfolio of public assets. That includes around 80 parks, four community centers, a marina, a golf course, a zoo and aquarium, and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park in Eatonville. Managing the budget for an organization that operates like both a government and a business requires something more than an ERP and a stack of spreadsheets.
Challenges
Parks Tacoma relies on its ERP system to record transactions and manage its accounting. But the ERP wasn’t set up to support a collaborative budget process, so annual budget development ran almost entirely on Excel workarounds layered on top of it. Here’s what that looked like in practice:
- Manual exports and fragmented files: Without budgeting functionality that fit the way departments work, budget data was pulled out of the ERP and packaged into large Excel files that were distributed to individual budget owners across the organization. Each department would fill in their requests and return the files to be compiled into a single budget.
- Version control nightmares: When the compiled budget didn’t balance, someone had to go back through every individual file and make manual adjustments. Keeping track of which version was current, and making sure changes were communicated to the right people, was a constant challenge.
- Disconnected tools and duplicate work: Department managers who needed to track their spending had to log into the ERP, run their own reports, pull the data into Excel, and build their own tracking systems. When budget season came around, everyone was working from different numbers.
- Changes that fell through the cracks: There were instances where departments submitted their budgets, and months later, after they were already operating in the new fiscal year, they discovered changes had been made to their budget that they hadn’t been told about.
“It was very hectic, very piecemeal,” said John Landergan, Budget Administrator at Parks Tacoma. “It made it easy to be error prone. Things got missed or slipped through the cracks.”
Solution
Parks Tacoma didn’t replace its ERP. Instead, it added Euna Budget alongside it, with a simple strategy: let each system do what it does best. The ERP stays the system of record for transactions, and Euna Budget becomes the place where the budget is built, reviewed, and managed.
- A purpose-built budgeting platform: Parks Tacoma implemented Euna Budget to replace the Excel-based process. Department managers build their budgets and submit requests directly in the platform, so the organization has one shared place to manage the budget instead of passing files back and forth.
- An ERP that stays in place: The ERP remains the system of record for accounting and transactions. Euna Budget handles budget development, so the finance team can keep the system it already relies on.
- An API integration with the ERP: Euna Budget connects to the ERP through an API that runs an automated nightly import of actuals. The goal was to bring actuals into the budgeting environment so budgets and spending can be viewed together without manual exports.
- Set up around how the organization works: Budgets are organized by cost center and can be grouped by division, and the platform supports Parks Tacoma’s biennial budget cycle across a wide range of departments, from the zoo to the golf course to youth recreation programs.
“What I love about working in Euna is that when I’m presenting budget information to leadership, they’re seeing it in real time, straight from the system. It’s not a report I pulled and massaged on the back end. They know they can go in and see that same information themselves. That kind of transparency builds real trust.”
John Landergan, Budget Administrator at Parks Tacoma
Results
With Euna Budget and the ERP working together, the budget process looks different at every level.
- Budget owners get a real-time view without needing ERP access: Every morning, real activity from the ERP lands in Euna Budget. Dozens of managers across the organization, people whose primary job is running a zoo, maintaining parks, or managing youth sports programs, can open their cost center and see budget versus year-to-date actuals in a few clicks. They don’t need to know how to run an accounting report.
- Multi-year comparisons without pivot tables: Year-over-year budget and actual comparisons are built into the interface. What used to require running multiple reports, building a pivot table, and knowing enough Excel to make it work is now just a standard view.
- Amendments are faster and more accurate: Parks Tacoma runs a biennial budget and has navigated two significant mid-cycle budget amendments since John joined, including substantial spending changes implemented under tight timelines. “To make these changes without having Euna Budget, I feel like would have been much more difficult, and the accuracy would have been a lot lower,” he said. “The accuracy and flexibility we were able to work on the budget helped us tremendously in right-sizing.”
- Transparency and trust in the numbers: John can pull up a single cost center and get granular for a department manager, or group by division and show leadership a high-level trend in real time. When changes are made to a budget, the history is there. People can see what changed, when, and who made the call, so department managers aren’t finding out months later that their budget was adjusted without notice.
For John, the question of whether an organization with an ERP actually needs a dedicated budgeting system has a clear answer. “If your organization is still building budgets in Excel while your ERP sits there recording transactions, you’re missing something. A purpose-built budgeting system gives you the flexibility to work dynamically, collaborate across departments, and make changes with confidence. It’s not a replacement for your ERP. It’s what makes your ERP complete.”
Looking Ahead
Parks Tacoma is a big organization with a lot of moving parts, and John is still building out what’s possible inside Euna Budget. The ERP integration is established, the team is trained, and the foundation is in place. The next step is continuing to expand how the pairing supports the full range of departments, from the zoo to the golf course to the recreation programs that keep Tacoma’s parks running.