Local governments face increasing pressure to stretch every taxpayer dollar while delivering services, responding to changing priorities, and maintaining public trust. Yet many finance teams still rely on budgeting processes built around spreadsheets that become more difficult to manage each year. I know because that’s where we started in Lakeway.
When I joined the City of Lakeway, Texas, nearly every part of our budget lived in Excel. Multiple spreadsheets had to stay synchronized; broken links created constant headaches, and routine updates required manually checking formulas across files. Personnel budgeting made the limitations especially clear. Our police department alone has certification pay, step increases, partial-year hires, and other variables that quickly add complexity.
As local government budgeting grows more complicated, finance teams need processes that give departments access to current information, make participation easier, and allow staff to respond quickly when assumptions change.
Better Visibility Creates Better Budget Conversations
Three years ago, Lakeway implemented Euna Budget to centralize our budgeting process and reduce the manual work associated with managing interconnected spreadsheets.
Today, actual financial data from our ERP is available in the budgeting system each week, giving us a current budget-to-actual picture. Our team can spend more time analyzing information, evaluating financial scenarios, and helping departments understand their budgets. Just as important, we are no longer spending as much time determining which spreadsheet contains the latest answer. Finance and departments are working from the same information, which creates a more consistent starting point for budget discussions.
Department directors also have direct access to their budget information, which has done more than improve visibility; it has increased ownership of the budget. They enter their requests, explain the operational need behind them, attach supporting documentation, and follow those requests through the process. Finance still provides oversight and analysis, but departments are more directly accountable for explaining what they need and why.
That participation has changed the quality of our conversations. When department leaders can see the same information, finance sees, discussions move more quickly toward priorities, tradeoffs, and the decisions behind the numbers.
The change has also reduced routine questions to finance, giving our team more capacity to focus on forecasting and planning.
Faster Updates Help Government Respond to Change
Every budget changes. Projects move faster or slower than expected. Staffing plans shift. Revenues fluctuate. New priorities emerge. Finance teams need to keep financial information current as those changes occur.
When Lakeway recently needed to make significant budget revisions across the organization, we completed the updates in about an hour. Making and validating those same revisions across our previous interconnected spreadsheets would have taken roughly a week.
That speed meant leadership received updated financial information almost immediately, departments could continue planning, and our finance team could focus on evaluating decisions instead of rebuilding spreadsheets.
Personnel forecasting has improved as well. Modeling certification pay, step programs, partial-year hires, and other compensation variables has helped us produce personnel projections that closely match year-end actuals.
More accurate projections give leadership greater confidence when making financial decisions throughout the year.
Transparency Starts with Access to Information
Greater visibility has also helped us think differently about transparency.
Internally, department leaders can access their own financial information without relying on finance to produce a report or answer a routine question. Our next goal is to extend that visibility to residents.
We want our community to better understand how city resources support daily operations, infrastructure, public safety, and long-term priorities. Providing accessible budget-to-actual information can help residents follow how public dollars are being used and better understand what it takes to operate a city.
Giving Finance More Time to Plan
The biggest change for our finance team has been how we spend our time. With less manual maintenance and fewer routine information requests, we have more capacity to forecast, analyze trends, work with departments, and support leadership decisions.
That additional capacity matters because local government finance cannot stop at adopting the next annual budget. We also need to understand how today’s decisions affect future operating costs, capital needs, revenues, staffing, and long-term obligations. When less staff time is spent maintaining spreadsheets, more of it can be spent asking those longer-term questions.
Our experience in Lakeway has reinforced the importance of looking at budgeting as an organization-wide process. Finance needs accurate information; departments need visibility into their resources, leadership needs timely answers, and residents deserve transparency into how public funds support their community.
A stronger budgeting process brings those pieces together. Technology does not make the decisions for us, but it can remove much of the manual work that gets in the way of making them well. For Lakeway, that has meant spending less time maintaining the numbers and more time understanding what they mean—and using them to plan for what comes next.
The author, Jodi Lehman-Wills, is a Budget Analyst & Grants Coordinator, City of Lakeway, Texas.