Each year the County Administrator's Office produces a digital and physical budget book for the Recommended Budget. The process involves creating, formatting, and synthesizing nearly 200 Excel, Word, and PDF files into a single, cohesive, budget document. Narratives are written, hundreds of tables and charts are pasted in, countless individual figures are populated and vetted and re-vetted, and a table of contents is assembled and manually hyperlinked. Since 2011, the annual cycle for the budget book has resulted in a Government Finance Officers Association’s (GFOA) Distinguished Budget Presentation Award, but the process has been manual and extremely labor intensive.
The requested contract with ClearGov would provide a software subscription service to help produce an easy to navigate, web-based budget book with far more administrative efficiency. Raw data files for the county's budget would be loaded in the software system and transformed. The GFOA award criteria has been built-in to ClearGov’s framework and templates, and auto-creates key sections and pre-populates them with required data. Subsequent updating of budget tables, charts, and figures throughout the budget book would be far simpler and error-free, and virtually all of the administrative and formatting tasks would be automated, freeing staff to focus on content. The County's Recommended Budget would be available online in an intuitive, easy to navigate, interactive format, or it could be downloaded as a single PDF document.
Obtaining the subscription service would enable the County to more easily produce an award winning budget book that would be more user friendly and accessible for the public.
Disapproval of the recommendation would continue the manual, highly labor-intensive production of the County's annual budget book, and the County would not have an easy to navigate, interactive web-based version of the annually recommended budget.