Town of Palm Beach, Florida
A Seaside Town Reduces its Financial Reporting Time from 3 Months to 6 Weeks

Primary Objective

From Fragmented to Fully Fused

Transform the town’s fragmented, manual reporting process into an integrated, automated disclosure workflow

Challenge

The Challenge of a One-Person Team

The Town of Palm Beach’s finance team was trapped in survival mode. With just one staff member handling budget and payroll, they spent 90+ days a year piecing together spreadsheets and Word documents. This left no room for the strategic work they wanted to pursue.

Specifically, Palm Beach encountered these issues in their financial reporting process:

• Version control chaos – Constantly chasing down the right spreadsheet, “not knowing which one was the right one to be using.”
  
• Manual, error-prone process – Every data change required updating multiple documents (and endless opportunities for inconsistencies).
  
• No bandwidth for excellence – no time to publish a PAFR, which Palm Beach had wanted to create for over 20 years.

“The biggest challenge had to be the back and forth – never knowing what’s changed or what needs to be updated,” said Melissa Ladd, Controller, Town of Palm Beach, FL.

Solution

Connecting the dots of disjointed disclosure

Palm Beach adopted Gravity by ClearGov’s ACFR Financial Reporting solution to convert their disconnected, manual process into a unified, automated reporting workflow.

The ACFR Financial Reporting solution provided:

• Data integration – All financial data in one, single platform.
  
• Real-time updates – One change populates everywhere automatically.
  
• Collaborative workflow – Clear status tracking to put an end to version confusion.
  
• Configurability – Gravity by ClearGov adapted to Palm Beach’s existing process instead of forcing them to change.

Results

Connecting the dots of disjointed disclosure

Adopting the ACFR Financial Reporting solution allowed Palm Beach to achieve the following:

Efficiency gains – Gravity by ClearGov fostered clear workflows that eliminated version control chaos and spreadsheet confusion.

Stronger talent acquisition – Adopting modern technology helped the town’s recruitment and allowed staff to change hiring criteria.

Major time savings – Palm Beach cut ACFR production time from 90 days to 6 weeks in the first year. And they expect even faster publication in years to come.

Capacity to create a PAFR – Palm Beach’s time savings allowed them to deliver a Popular Annual Financial Reporting (PAFR), which had been a longstanding goal of the town.

The coveted GFOA Triple Crown – Putting out a PAFR allowed Palm Beach to win the GFOA Triple Crown by winning the GFOA’s awards in financial reporting, budget presentation, and PAFR — a feat achieved by fewer than 1% of US governments.

Implementing the ACFR Financial Reporting solution gave Palm Beach widespread benefits that improved everything from their reporting production processes to their recruitment practices. Your government can achieve the same with ClearGov.

We’re used to changing one number in five different documents. So, when you enter it once and it populates everywhere? It’s hard to believe it actually works – but it does!

Melissa Ladd, Controller, Town of Palm Beach, FL

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