League of California Cities

About You

The League of California Cities is a nonprofit organization supporting and advocating for the interests of California’s 483 cities.

I am the Chief Financial Officer at the league. I own the budget and forecasting process, in concert with 6 other department heads, our CEO, and the Board of Directors.

Three members of the Finance team, 1 HR lead, 6 department heads, and 4 other managers are the key staff developing and maintaining annual budgets and updates.

Choosing Budgyt

I did an online search for FP&A tools and conducted my own needs assessment and evaluation of options.

Yes, other tools were considered. Budgyt seemed to have a fairly easy and straightforward implementation path, especially compared to some of the other more complex packages. Budgyt might not have all the same features of the more complex packages, but it had all that we need given our size and structure.

Competitive price, ease of use, broad functionality/configurability, ease of implementation, and online ratings all played a major role in us selecting Budgyt.

Results

Changes:

• Getting better at utilizing the product
• Better buy-in among department heads as they get more comfortable with the tool and its capabilities
• I stopped having to ask our AP accountant for vendor or payment information, since it’s all contained in Budgyt and easily searchable (not reports by vendor per se, but the ability to see individual transactions)
• I hardly ever sign in to our accounting system for ad hoc reporting or analysis, as I do almost all reporting and analysis out of Budgyt. The accounting system is still the system of record, and the source for audit materials. But management reporting, interim reports, Board reporting, etc. are much easier in Budgyt
• The whole organization feels less stress about the annual budget process
• Profit and loss at the individual project level (i.e. annual conference, city managers conference, website ad sales) became possible; impractical or onerous to track at that level previously

Time Saved:

• I was able to shave a month off the annual budget approval process from Year 1 to Year 2 using Budgyt. Probably saved close to 3 weeks, even in Year 1, compared to the last year in the Excel method
• Reduced the time to complete detailed variance analysis by 30-40%
• Researching individual transactions is essentially real-time now, rather than a 10 or 15-minute conversation to track it down
• Export features make the setup for analysis in Excel much quicker; maybe a 50% improvement in detailed analysis compared to using our accounting system exports

Surprises:

• Initial surprise over how much functionality Budgyt delivers for a competitive price
• How useful the search feature is to find a specific vendor invoice amount or expense item (for instance, using a board member’s last name pulls all their travel entries); or finding which departments use a specific vendor (i.e. Office Depot); or to see where an infrequently-purchased service was coded in the past
• Great flexibility of the salary allocation function, including benefits costs; we allocate at a project level, and the setup is flexible enough to handle sometimes up to 15 separate allocations for a single employee
• How useful it is to have multiple versions of scenarios. For instance, I take a snapshot at key interim periods that is used in Board reporting. I can always go to that snapshot to recreate or research results; without that snapshot, it wasn’t always easy to reconcile back to interim Board financials due to entries that come in after the snapshot was pulled.