Platte City, MO

Primary Objective

Find a government budgeting solution to automate the time-consuming and manual process of developing the budget and building the budget book.

Challenge

Platte City, Missouri historically spent a significant amount of time from June through September creating their budget and PDF budget book. It was a very manual, slow, and time-consuming process using email, Excel and Word to create a PDF that was posted on the city’s website.

The process was further exacerbated due to the fact that multiple iterations of the budget had to be reviewed by elected officials and committees before approval. It was a tedious and error-prone process to make changes in multiple places in order to create the next version.

Assistant City Administrator, Marji Gehr, was looking for a government budgeting software tool to automate the process and get back valuable time for more impactful tasks.

Being a spreadsheet jockey isn’t fulfilling work. I’m always looking for ways to automate what we do, and to make the finance and accounting team’s contribution more meaningful to our organization. ClearGov gave us back countless hours that we’re able to apply to far more impactful tasks, like long-term forecasting, to better serve our community and show our commitment to transparency.

Marji Gehr
Assistant City Administrator

ClearGov Solution

The city’s onboarding process was “phenomenal,” according to Gehr. The ClearGov team was responsive, easy to work with, and instantly addressed any questions that came up. The ClearGov team even made a suggestion for organizing data that worked out really well, providing greater visibility and more meaningful insights from their data.

Thanks to ClearGov Operational Budgeting, Gehr was able to accelerate their annual budgeting process by 60 days. Because department heads could provide input directly into the software, there was no tracking people down, shuffling around emails, and consolidating spreadsheets. Each change, no matter how minor, was automatically refreshed across the budget in real-time — saving significant time and showing the most recent data in the same view. The intake process, which normally took 3-4 weeks, was completed in just a few days.

In addition, the finance and personnel teams’ initial review used to consist of a 300 page report straight from the finance system. Using ClearGov Digital Budget Book, however, Gehr was able to show the same data in graphical format, transforming the initial meeting from a data review to a meaningful conversation.

The city is looking forward to using ClearGov’s Personnel Budgeting solution to build out scenarios and show how they can make their newly adopted salary structure work long-term. By creating multi-year, multi-scenario models, elected officials can easily see how the personnel budget impacts the overall budget for years to come.

One of the things I love most about ClearGov is that it’s very intuitive. Like most organizations, we’re busy and so a bit resistant to spending time with tutorials and instructions. With ClearGov, we didn’t even need them! They’ve done a fantastic job of staying true to their promise that the software is easy to use for any local government.

Marji Gehr
Assistant City Administrator