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Fletcher & Fletcher Quarterly
F&F Quarterly 
Fall Edition 
October 2009
Greetings!
After more than 20 years of business in providing Budget software for government jursidictions, Fletcher & Fletcher has decided to begin releasing quarterly newsletters. Our goal is to provide you with information concerning best practices and upcoming technological advances to help your juridiction produce a better budget more easily.
In This Issue
New Budgeting Practices
Drawbacks of Excel
Police Women of Broward County
Budgeting Needs Assessment
New Budget Presentation Best Practices
 
GFOA has released new recommended practices concerning website presentation of budgeting documents. This document encourages local government to demonstrate transparency of information to their constituents by making all budget documents readily available to citizens in an easy to understand manner. It is critical that budget offices be able to produce budget documents in an electronic format and make them accesible to citizens online. This document could also help improve your department's chance of winning the GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award and make your budget information more easily understood by your citizens. 
 
 
Drawbacks of Microsoft Excel
 
Anyone that has used Microsoft Excel to develop complex models including 50+ worksheets can tell you that it is not the best way to do things. Producing such elaborate models requires you to have VBA experience, is an incredibly slow and labor intensive process and can still be very prone to human error. Not to mention there is very little data integrity, it is hard to build relationships between data and data analysis can be very time consuming. Without a consolidated database of information, jursidictions are rely on having many staff members just to keep track data and all the different files that the data resides in.
 
Best technological practices dictate that if you have a large amount of data you should keep all of it in one consolidated, inter-related database. This will allow you to reduce potential for human error and make it far easier to perform data analysis and reporting. Once a database has been created, users can utilize a graphical user interface which interacts with the database to perform all budget manipulation functions. This way all the data manipulations can be automated to make a change in one place that may affect thousands of records rather than manually changing records one by one.
 
If you want to improve your efficiency, reduce human error, reduce labor costs, and produce a better budget your jurisdiction should begin looking into a system that manipulates a database rather than rely on an antiquated spreadsheet system.
 
 
 

 
Police Women of Broward County
 
Check out 'Police Women of Broward County' on TLC. Broward County Sheriff's Office, composed of 6,300 empoyees with a $700 million annual budget, uses our comprehensive budgeting system to create their budget. Watch their officers in action as they fight crime and take down the bad guys! 
 
Fletcher & Fletcher has over 20 years of experience in providing Budgeting Software for the Public Sector. Our product allows you to perform all perform budgeting for your funds, personnel, CIP, performance measures and reporting. We strive to provide software that will  allow you to create your budget professionally and efficiently. Feel free to call or e-mail us anytime for more information about our product.
 
Sincerely,
 

Douglas Fletcher
Fletcher & Fletcher
Budgeting Needs Assessment
Rarely, if ever, do jursdictions perform a needs assessment of their current budgeting procedures. Many budget offices do not incorporate latest best practices to help create better budgets with more accountability. Many cities or counties will go for more then a decade without making a determination of how they could increase efficiency given latest advances in technology. Often budgeting offices do not even know what options are available to them because they do not meet with suppliers to view what software is out there to help meet their needs. This leaves jurisdictions with outdated software, behind the times budgeting practices, and makes creating the budget a labor intensive process. In these troubled ecomonic times with jurisdictions cutting budgets and staffing, it is important for budgeting offices to use state-of-the-art budgeting software to make up for labor gaps, increase efficiency, and reduce human errors.  
 
Unfortunately, government is often behind the private sector in adapting to new technologies, even
though their accountability should force them to be the earliest adopters. As a concerned business dedicated to best budgeting and as taxpayers, our company wants to ensure that all jurisdictions know what options are available to them in terms of technology and procedure. Even if you do not choose to purchase from our company, we would like to be the ones to help you move forward.
 
Please contact our company at 904-273-6277 and we will be happy to provide you with a needs assessment to determine what changes you need to make to your technology and budget processes.
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