Coral Springs, Florida
A Suburban City Saves Two Weeks of Annual Work and Gains Payroll Scenario Modeling

Primary Objective

A Push for Clarity and Efficiency

Streamline budgeting process, increase transparency for both staff and residents, and replace inefficient, error-prone tools with clear, structured, and user-friendly solutions.

Background

A Sunny City with Bright Budgeting Opportunity

Coral Springs, Florida, located in Broward County, has a population of more than 130,000 residents. In 2021, Ileana Kyriakides joined the city as Budget Manager after nearly two decades at Nova Southeastern University, where she had led financial system implementations. She became Director of Budget and Sustainability in 2022 and quickly focused on improving the city’s budgeting systems.

Challenge

Manual Processes, Complex Tools, and Single Points of Failure

Before adopting ClearGov, Coral Springs relied heavily on Excel schedules and Adobe InDesign to produce its budget book. The process was time-consuming and required specialized skills in graphic design that not all budget staff possessed. Personnel budgeting was handled in spreadsheets and in the city’s ERP, which proved inadequate for the city’s needs.

Over three budget cycles, Kyriakides gave Coral Springs’ ERP a fair chance at personnel budgeting, but each year exposed more flaws. By year three, she concluded the system could not deliver the projections the city needed. She also explained how Excel “becomes your brain,” making it hard for others to follow another person’s spreadsheets and reinforcing the need for more structured, repeatable processes.

These disconnected systems created inefficiencies, increased the chance of errors, and concentrated payroll budgeting knowledge in a single person, leaving the city vulnerable if staff turnover occurred.

[Our ERP] had a module for personnel projections, payroll budgeting basically. Unfortunately the solution didn’t work as we intended it to. It did create the need to continue utilizing Excel very extensively to get our payroll projection fine tuned to what the city needs.

Solution

A Digital Budget Book to Replace InDesign

Coral Springs decided to move away from InDesign and selected ClearGov Digital Budget Book through an RFP process. The choice was driven by cost, functionality, ADA compliance, and the opportunity to improve transparency for residents and staff. 

With Digital Budget Book, Coral Springs gained customizable, ADA-optimized pages, ensuring accessibility compliance while avoiding the costly, manual remediation required with InDesign. The product’s auto-generated charts and tables replaced hand-built Excel schedules, and automatic data updates allowed anyone on the team to map budget data once, then refresh charts and tables as numbers changed.

After establishing Digital Budget Book, Coral Springs found it needed a better solution for payroll projections than what their ERP provided. Kyriakides was impressed with ClearGov’s strong support and peer referrals, and she knew that stronger ties between another ClearGov module and Digital Budget Book could unlock even more value.

So, the city subsequently adopted ClearGov Personnel Budgeting. Personnel Budgeting includes smart data imports with error checking, and Coral Springs used this capability to move away from fragile Excel spreadsheets and into a structured, more reliable system.

We did look at a couple other solutions. But ClearGov, at the price point for what they were already providing to us and the support that we knew we were receiving from ClearGov, really solidified staying with ClearGov.

Implementation

Supportive, Structured, and Smooth

Onboarding both products was smooth, with ClearGov’s team providing close guidance, training, and responsive support. The city especially valued the hands-on help with mapping, reporting, and the flexibility to give feedback during the process. “They really held our hand — that’s the best way that I can put it. They knew that this was a big change. They were there to answer all the questions and to take feedback,” Kyriakides says.

Once Kyriakides embraced the ClearGov workflow, she found that adopting Personnel Budgeting was a straightforward process. Familiarity with Digital Budget Book made it easy to work within the system and use it intuitively. And throughout the process, Kyriakides called ClearGov’s support team kind, supportive, and gentle.

Results

Saving Time, Expanding Access, and Increasing Transparency

With ClearGov, Coral Springs has significantly reduced manual work, spread budgeting knowledge across the department, and enhanced public transparency. The city has also extended ClearGov’s use beyond budgeting, leveraging the platform to create other public-facing documents.

Key achievements:

• Time savings: Using Digital Budget Book and Personnel Budgeting together saves Coral Springs staff about two weeks’ worth of work each year.
• Fewer bottlenecks: Payroll budgeting responsibility is now shared across staff instead of resting on one person. This is particularly critical since payroll makes up about 70% of Coral Springs’ total budget.
• Improved transparency: Residents can now access clear, ADA-compliant budget information online, with local media even citing the digital budget book in reporting. Residents also regularly respond to the city’s budget content, and hyperlocal newspapers report on the details.
• Creating a variety of reports in one solution: Departments use ClearGov Digital Budget Book to build governance manuals, strategic plans, and quick “bite-sized” financial explainers like property tax guides. The city also produces its annual business plan through Digital Budget Book, ensuring consistency across multiple communications.
• Faster decision-making: Personnel Budgeting’s scenario modeling has allowed Kyriakides to retrieve crucial financial information related to collective bargaining in minutes instead of hours. This helps municipal leadership make critical decisions much quicker. 

Digital Budget Book and Personnel Budgeting have transformed Coral Springs’ budgeting process by saving staff time, reducing reliance on manual spreadsheets, spreading critical knowledge across the team, and making financial information more transparent and accessible to both leadership and residents. ClearGov can do the same for your organization.

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