Little Rock, Arkansas
The Natural State’s Capital Earns GFOA Awards and Cuts Budget Workload by 25%

Primary Objective

An Award-Winning Budget Book and a Streamlined Personnel Budgeting Process

Building a modern, award-winning budget book and a personnel budgeting process that improves efficiency and compliance while reducing staff burden. 

Background

A City With Big-City Amenities and Small-City Feel

Located in central Arkansas, the City of Little Rock is home to just over 200,000 residents. As the state’s capital and largest city, it offers the amenities of a metropolitan hub while maintaining the community feel of a smaller city. Little Rock Budget Manager Gary Chapman is a veteran of municipal work, having worked at four other cities across two other states. 

Challenge

Manual Budgeting in a Cumbersome ERP

Before ClearGov, Little Rock relied on its ERP system, paired with Excel spreadsheets to prepare both personnel budgets and the city’s annual budget book. The ERP system was not intuitive, forcing staff to spend countless hours compiling and reformatting data.

For years, the city had relied on a 20-year-old custom Excel spreadsheet, built and maintained by a single staff member, to manage job codes and personnel position-level data. This process was fragile and unsustainable, leaving the city exposed if that employee retired.

Budget book preparation was especially time-consuming. Excel spreadsheets were manually converted into PDFs, and staff spent months making adjustments to tables of contents every time pages changed. Even small rounding errors in Excel formulas created unnecessary headaches and threw budget totals off.

The ERP system also required multiple steps to close the books, making the monthly close process prone to delays and inefficiencies. And much of this work fell on a single finance leader, who, “probably spent 9 months of toiling away to put together a budget.”

Solution

Budget Book Excellence Followed by Personnel Budget Modernization

Little Rock’s adoption of ClearGov began when the city’s CFO, who previously worked at a Texas municipality, brought knowledge of the platform with him. Having seen its benefits firsthand, he introduced ClearGov to Little Rock to modernize the city’s budget book practices. 

The city first adopted ClearGov Digital Budget Book to streamline production of its annual budget book and ensure it adhered to GFOA award criteria. After successfully modernizing its budget book with ClearGov Digital Budget Book, Little Rock recognized the opportunity to expand its use of the platform and tackle another long-standing pain point: personnel budgeting.

Once we saw how much easier the Digital Budget Book was, it was natural to say, “okay, let’s go ahead and get Personnel Budgeting, too.

Soon after, Little Rock added ClearGov Personnel Budgeting to modernize and safeguard workforce planning in the city. Personnel Budgeting replaced a massive Excel spreadsheet that had been maintained by one staff member for two decades. This enabled the city to centralize all position data, plan for vacancies, manage union negotiations, and run scenarios across multiple years. 

By pairing Personnel Budgeting with the Digital Budget Book, Little Rock achieved both consistency and accuracy across two of the most resource-intensive parts of the city’s budgeting process.

Implementation

Hands-On Learning and Ongoing Support

Chapman familiarized himself with the ClearGov platform through ClearGov Academy resources, webinars, and direct support. The city especially benefited from ClearGov’s hands-on guidance in setting up the Personnel Budgeting module.

Staff built their GFOA-compliant Digital Budget Book  by entering line-item detail, then adding statistical data, graphics, and capital plans directly into ClearGov’s templates. They used the GFOA award checklist to check off criteria as they completed sections, ensuring a structured, award-ready process.

The city later worked with ClearGov support to align its complicated HR job codes with ClearGov’s position control system, a process that simplified future vacancy planning, union modeling, and multi-year workforce forecasting.

One of the positives with ClearGov is that they have the ClearGov Academy. So I spent time just reading all the different steps. But once I started doing it myself, I could really see how it worked.

Results

Efficiency Gains and Award-Winning Success

With ClearGov Digital Budget Book and Personnel Budgeting, Little Rock has already realized major improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and compliance.

Key outcomes:

• GFOA Award-Ready Budgets: ClearGov’s built-in award checklists and templates helped Little Rock produce GFOA-aligned, award-ready budget books for the last two budget cycles.
• Time Savings: Budget season previously required 10–12 hour workdays for five straight months. With ClearGov, Little Rock staff expect at least a 25% reduction in that workload as processes mature.
• Greater Accuracy and Resilience: Personnel Budgeting replaced a fragile 20-year-old Excel spreadsheet with rules-based modeling and error-checked data uploads, ensuring sustainability even if long-tenured staff retire.
• Scenario Planning Power: The Personnel Budgeting dashboard now supports multi-year forecasts, vacancy planning, and union negotiation modeling, giving Little Rock leadership clearer insight into staffing costs.
• Compliance and Oversight: ClearGov helps the city produce documents that meet federal and state grant reporting requirements, demonstrating proper use of funds and ensuring accountability.

By modernizing both its budget book production and personnel budgeting, Little Rock has improved efficiency, accuracy, and transparency while reducing the burden on staff. ClearGov can help you achieve the same results—simplifying your budgeting process, saving time, and setting your organization up for long-term success.

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