Budget Cycle Management: The Key to Streamlined Budget Book & Financial Report Creation

Financial reporting — from preparing budget books to issuing annual comprehensive financial reports (ACFRs) — is filled with hurdles that hinder easy collaboration and clear presentation. 

Endless emails. Chasing down contributions. Manual formatting. Stakeholders who can’t sift through 100+-page budget books. All are familiar refrains to most public finance professionals. 

But financial reporting doesn’t have to be this way. Employing a modern approach to budget cycle management (BCM) where reporting, planning & tracking, budgeting, and engagement are equal parts of a holistic process will help you bust silos to your financial reporting — including between dense financial documents and the public.

Read on to see why your organization may be due for a reporting process refresh and how to carry it out with BCM.

Problems with Traditional Financial Reporting

Inefficient financial reporting inflicts drudgery upon two groups: the teams that compile the reports and the public that receives them.  

Is Compiling Reports a Grind for Your Teams? 

Traditional financial reporting is typically a slog to get through. And inefficient systems and processes are the primary culprits for hindered financial reporting and building financial documents like budget books and financial reports. 

Part of the issue involves the many departments and teams that contribute to traditional financial reporting. Oftentimes, finance directors must chase down other contributors for content via endless back-and-forth emails. 

But department directors usually have their hands full with all sorts of issues. They certainly won’t have their reports for a budget book or an ACFR top of mind. This puts undue pressure on finance directors and stretches out an already-long reporting process even further. 

Sometimes, contributors are allowed to edit the budget book or ACFR themselves. But this also creates multiple instances of inefficiency, since local governments and school districts often use a combination of legacy office software tools (like ERP systems, Microsoft Word, Excel, and Publisher) to create their financial reports. 

With multiple contributors using multiple tools to create reports, financial directors often encounter the following challenges:

• Juggling multiple report versions. 

• Having to reconcile formatting issues in each version. 

• Consolidating data across multiple reports. 

• Manually building reports with finicky software.

• Lacking templates to help you quickly replicate reports of years past. 

Can Your Audiences Understand Your Financial Reports?

Even when local governments and school districts complete their financial reports, the presentation usually leaves a lot to be desired. Financial reports created with office software often get presented as static PDFs or spreadsheets that are hundreds of pages long. 

A lot of elected officials and stakeholders don’t speak fluent Spreadsheet, and they have a difficult time relating numerical data to their local government or school district’s financial narrative. And even if they can speak the lingo, PDFs are tough to navigate — especially on mobile devices.

Let’s face it: Financial reports and documents aren’t exactly New York Times bestsellers. And that’s true even for finance buffs. For those who don’t understand finance, dense financial documents are as clear as doctoral dissertations on the subject. And your community stakeholders don’t have time for a crash course in public finance.

If your financial reporting is a grind to get through and it produces reports that are a grind to read through — your organization could be due for an upgrade to BCM.

How Budget Cycle Management Prioritizes Collaboration, Consistent Formatting, and Clear Presentation in Reporting

Modern 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. It prioritizes cross-team coordination, forward thinking, cloud-based technology, efficiency, and transparency.

Whereas traditional budgeting is often carried out in disjointed silos, a modern BCM framework replaces these isolated areas with four key, interconnected phases of the budget cycle process: Planning & Tracking, Budgeting, Reporting, and Engagement. 

In the context of financial reporting, BCM principles advocate busting silos, keeping processes flowing without bottlenecks, and clearly presenting dense information. Let’s discuss how you can apply this thinking to your financial reporting. 

Applying BCM to Your Financial Reporting  

Employing BCM best practices ensures that financial reporting is easy for both the teams that conduct it and the teams that read the results. And adopting modern BCM principles is easy because they adapt to suit any public agency’s needs.

BCM leverages the power of the cloud to bring financial reporting into the modern age. Using cloud-based tools for financial reporting allows you to:

• Establish a transparent, collaborative process for creating financial reports and documents, with clear deadlines communicated.

• Set up a centralized organizational hub to store all content.

• Use consistent templates to help you quickly replicate previous reports and documents.

• Employ administrative access controls to establish consistent settings, relieving contributors from adjusting their additions and negating the need to clean up inconsistencies.

In BCM, clean financial report and document presentation is equally as important as cleaning up the process for assembling it. 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.

To that end, financial reports and documents should:

• Integrate narrative, visuals, and performance data to engagingly explain financial reporting data.

• Prioritize easy navigation and clear comprehension for non-financial readers. You can accomplish this with items such as tables of contents, financial term glossaries, executive summaries, and lists of figures.

• Incorporate ADA-compliant accessibility for all audiences. Use this checklist to ensure WCAG 2.1 Level A and Level AA compliance.

• Use consistent formatting to mitigate confusion.

• Be presented in web form as well as PDF form, to satisfy all readers

How Radnor Township, PA, School District Streamlined its Financial Reporting and Produced an Award-Winning Budget Book

Radnor Township, PA, School District used BCM principles and cloud-based software to transform their budget book preparation and presentation. The result landed them a three-month budget book preparation process and an ASBO Meritorious Budget Award.

Prior to adopting BCM, the district’s budget team, led by Business Administrator Brian Pawling, would create charts and graphs in Microsoft Excel. The team would then copy and paste them into a Microsoft Word template, and then manually format the images so that they would be centered on the page. This often yielded formatting inconsistencies, and it took a long time. 

Once Radnor Township School District’s budget documents were completed, they would then print out the entire budget and present their comprehensive annual budget report to the nine-member school board — in large binders. 

Pawling sought to streamline Radnor Township School District’s budget book preparation process, and the school district adopted ClearGov Digital Budget Book to build its budget books. Pawling’s team was able to map data more efficiently, streamline collaboration between multiple team members, and ensure a more attractive budget presentation. 

The net result was a budget book that took only three months to prepare, won the prestigious ASBO Meritorious Budget Award, and garnered great feedback from community stakeholders, school board members, and the school district’s superintendent. View Radnor Township’s award-winning budget book.

“ClearGov saved us a tremendous amount of time versus what my prior experience was of doing it in Excel and Word and doing all of that formatting.” 

– Brian Pawling, Business Administrator, Radnor Township, MA School District

Report with ClearGov Digital Budget Book and Digital Financial Reporting

As Radnor Township School District and over 1,300 communities have seen, ClearGov’s financial reporting solutions allow you to consolidate communications, streamline financial report creation, and present your work in clear-cut, visually-stimulating ways. 

ClearGov Digital Budget Book and Digital Financial Reporting embody the BCM principles of collaboration, automation, and clear presentation. With ClearGov Digital Budget Book, you can produce an award-winning budget book in a fraction of the time it took you to create previous budget books. And ClearGov Digital Financial Reporting helps you build interactive financial reports in no time.Employing BCM best practices ensures that financial reporting is easy for both the teams that conduct it and the teams that read the results. And our public finance experts are here to help you apply BCM principles to your financial reporting. Reach out to us for a demo to see how BCM can work for your organization.