The city’s proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year will mean new software for its finance and accounting tasks that coincide with software already being used by the planning and development department and software that will be implemented by human resources in the fall.

City Manager Kelly Traynham said following Tuesday’s city council meeting there is $300,000 budgeted for the OpenGov Budgeting & Planning software. “It’s custom-built so you can’t tell exactly what it’s going to cost. They give us an estimated range. We estimated our budget expense (for the software) on the higher end and are hoping we won’t be there. If we don’t spend it all it will go back into our fund balance.”

Currently the city is using Excel to do the budget. That system was never fully implemented across all departments 10 years ago, Traynham said.

The OpenGov Budgeting & Planning software is user friendly, the city manager said. “A council member can have access if they want to see a department budget and use their phone and pull it right up. It provides a lot of data and has interactive reporting measures to help produce efficiency.”

When an invoice is processed with the current system department employees not located in city hall must bring them over. “All of this will be done. We’re going to take out a lot of the manual steps that were really subject to a lot of errors. It will improve our accuracy,” Traynham said.

The city is currently using OpenGov Citizen Services in the planning and development department. “Two years ago when we talked about ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding we proposed the whole suite but council was hesitant about spending that much money on it so we said let’s just do the citizen services piece. It’s been up for about a year now and it is working well.”

Traynham said site reviewers like when site plans come in via the OpenGov Citizen Services system. “The different departments and other people like DOT or the sanitary district that are involved are also reviewing it so all their comments get posted live like where before it was we all piled up comments into a letter. It’s saving people time.”

The budgeting and planning component of OpenGov will account for all of the city’s payroll, all of its budgeting, all of its revenues coming in and expenses going out. “For capital projects the software will assign a lifespan for the project based on standards. It will start notifying you of replacement schedules and things like that — things that are needed where right now if you’re an employee it’s the verbal dialogue.”

There’s another aspect of the software, Traynham said, and that’s accounting for a younger workforce. “The things that we do manually, the younger generations entering the workforce right now are not going to know how to do it.”

And, she said, it’s safer because it will be cloud-based. “It’s a program that’s developed for local government. Right now we’re using a program that wasn’t designed for local government — it was designed for school systems. Other communities that implemented it the same time as we did have moved on from that now.”

The city has been using its current system for about 11 years and not all departments have it.  “They can’t even get it.”

Getting the budget and planning system, she said, “This would complete it and bring us full circle.”

The city is getting ready to integrate the NeoGov part that was approved by council two years ago. 

NeoGov is the human resources and personnel component. 

To have NeoGov and not have the financial piece for OpenGov  would increase manual operations because NeoGov doesn’t communicate with what the city is currently using, the city manager said. “We can’t even pull the data off.”

And then some departments are using software which predates that which is currently being used for finance. 

The creator of that software is deceased and public works work orders are contained in the system along with the city’s cemetery database. “We’re like one lightning strike away from losing volumes of data,” Traynham said.

The good news, however, is everything is ready to start once the budget is approved, she said.

She compared the final component of OpenGov to the Mr. Potato Head toy. “This is like the body of Mr. Potato Head and the part planning has is like an arm.”