Beaumont, California
A Suburban City Receives First GFOA Award and Streamlines Capital Planning

Primary Objective

Streamlining capital budgeting to win the city’s first GFOA award

Implement modern budgeting solutions that streamline the collection of capital requests across departments, improve the process of creating the budget, save time building the budget book, and help Beaumont win its first GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation award.

Challenge

Manual Excel processes created inefficiency and frustration

The City of Beaumont faced considerable challenges in their capital budgeting process, primarily due to their long-time use of manual, Excel-based systems. Like other local governments, the city realized that these manual processes made gathering, compiling, and prioritizing requests from department heads tedious and inefficient. Naturally, these manual processes also came with the risk of human errors.

Compounding these issues was the lack of an effective tracking system for capital requests. Without a transparent and reliable request system, there was a lot of back and forth between the finance team and department heads that led to frequent misunderstandings and frustration.

Solution

Unified system with seamless digital budget book integration

ClearGov’s Capital Budgeting solution was chosen because it seamlessly integrated with Digital Budget Book, which the city was already using. This choice provided a unified system for handling capital requests from department heads while allowing the finance team to easily organize and view the categorized requests in one place.

ClearGov’s ease of use was another key benefit. With support from ClearGov, including tutorials, videos, and responsive customer service, city staff found it easy to adopt and start using the new system.

ClearGov’s user-friendliness and the responsive support from their team, including the helpful videos and tutorials, made the onboarding process very easy—which was exactly what we needed.

Results

Significant time savings and first-year GFOA award win

• ClearGov’s Capital Budgeting solution collectively saved the City of Beaumont significant time that was previously spent manually gathering and formatting data
• Real-time visibility of budget requests and updates significantly improved collaboration between departments and the finance team
• Once requests were approved and accepted, the capital budget automatically transferred to the digital budget book
• The city was able to focus on producing more high-quality content for their budget book to help tie the budget to the city’s priorities and goals

With the handy criteria checklist and auto-generated content for the GFOA budget award already included in ClearGov’s Digital Budget Book, the city applied for the prestigious award for the first time. The city’s focus on budgeting excellence earned them a GFOA award that first year!

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