The Top 3 Reporting Takeaways from the 2025 GFOA Annual Conference

Just a few weeks ago, the 2025 Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) Annual Conference was hosted in Washington, DC. It was a fantastic few days of networking, seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and hearing about public finance-wide best practices from an array of conference sessions.

Many of the sessions at the GFOA Annual Conference covered financial reporting. Below, we’ve detailed our three biggest reporting-related takeaways from these sessions.

Takeaway 1: Watch out for common errors and new regulations when preparing financial reports

A lot of work goes into preparing financial reports like annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFRs), and they can contain a variety of errors that breach state and federal regulations. Common mistakes can be made due to negligence or mathematical error. For instance, two CPAs noted in a session, financial departments commonly make five separate mistakes when calculating the net investment in capital assets in their financial statements.

Notably this year, GASB Statement 103 started regulating changes to governments’ financial reporting model for fiscal years starting after June 15. This created new provisions for five key areas of financial reports. GASB 103 gets extremely technical, with requirements including everything from what topics you should and shouldn’t cover in a management’s discussion and analysis (MD&A) section to how to present various financial information in other sections.

Therefore, meticulousness and due diligence should be the key watchwords for preparing financial reports. GFOA has a variety of resources for creating the best financial reports you can — but cloud-based solutions can help immensely in building your financial reports (more on this later).

Takeaway 2: Tell your capital planning story in a digestible, engaging way in your capital project documents

Capital Improvement Plans (CIPs) discuss some of the most visible parts of local government and school districts: capital projects. But CIPs can also read very long, contain complicated language, and stay opaque about details. For community members who don’t understand finance or infrastructure, they can be a daunting read.

The best way to combat this is to keep information condensed, digestible, high-level, and relatable. A municipal finance director in Illinois suggested accomplishing this in capital documents by comparing preventative maintenance costs to emergency repair costs, making relative comparisons to items that constituents may have in their personal budgets, and conveying direct benefits of capital projects.

The finance director also recommended creating a condensed “Capital in Brief” document to quickly convey the purpose of capital projects, high-level spending and funding summaries, and project-related insights for community stakeholders. Capital In Brief documents are a great place to include the aforementioned relatable insights about capital projects, too.

Takeaway 3: Break down budget figures for community members — and try new ways of presenting them

Explaining government finance extends, of course, to budgets as well. Budget books are a great way to break down budgeting into graphs and charts, as well as condensed language that constituents can understand.

The finance director of a municipality in Minnesota explained how his municipality broke their budget down even further: into a poster board that can quickly communicate your budget messaging. The chief goals of the city’s “budget board” were to communicate the value of city services, their lower costs compared to nearby cities, the budget’s effects on homeowners, and information about the city’s property taxes. To that end, the budget board contains charts, tables, and graphs, as well as digestible information about the municipality’s budget.

The Minnesota municipality’s budget board was used in both municipal online media as well as in-person as a prop in community meetings and on display in the city hall. It’s proved to be an effective and novel approach to communicating budget information transparently to community members in the city.

Modern BCM: Reporting for Duty

The balance of precision and thoroughness with engaging communication and eased comprehension can be a tough one to strike in financial reporting. But it’s practically the calling card of financial reporting as practiced in the modern Budget Cycle Management (BCM) model.

BCM is a strategic framework that transforms budgeting into a holistic, streamlined set of planning and budget management practices that any public agency can implement. The goal of BCM is to ensure a seamlessly integrated approach to budgeting that involves all relevant teams with as little friction as possible. 

Reporting as practiced in the BCM model means leveraging the power of the cloud to bring financial reporting into the modern age. Using cloud-based tools for financial reporting allows public financial professionals to establish a transparent, collaborative process for creating financial reports and documents. Cloud-based software makes use of consistent templates, which help professionals stay on top of regulations like GASB 103 and quickly replicate previous reports and documents

In the same spirit of easing collaboration among departments, BCM advocates making it easier for the public to understand the work that their local governments and school districts do. Finance professionals can do that by integrating narrative, visuals, and performance data to engagingly explain financial reporting data. 

So, strategies like the budget board and a Capital In Brief plan align with BCM-style reporting. But using cloud-native tools to create and present web-based budget books, CIPs, and ACFRs are also great ways to present your community’s financial information while easing collaboration and production.

Who wants to get caught up in the weeds of scrutinizing reports for GASB 103 inconsistencies? And who wants to read tens to hundreds of pages of CIP plans and budget reports? It’s a tough sell. 

The BCM model advocates sidestepping all of this. By using cloud-based solutions to eliminate drudgery and prioritizing community members when creating reports, you can focus less on formatting and calculations and more on making a difference in your community members’ lives.

ClearGov can help you report, plan, budget, and engage your community throughout the entire budget cycle. Register for our product tour webinar and learn how ClearGov is making budgeting easier, more transparent, and future-proof for over 1,300 agencies!