Gloucester City Council has improved its business efficiency by using a web based budgeting and forecasting system. The software has helped the Council to reduce its budget loading time from ten days to just minutes and to better monitor, evaluate and improve its financial performance by replacing spreadsheets.

Janet Parrott, Financial Planning Accountant at Gloucester City Council, explains,

“It used to take several members of the finance team over a week to complete their budget loading by collating information from various Excel spreadsheets. This process was extremely inefficient, prone to errors and didn’t provide us with an accurate picture of our finances.”

The web-based budgeting and forecasting system, which has been tightly integrated into Gloucester City Council’s existing ABS financial management system, enables the creation and real-time monitoring of financial plans and forecasts. Budgetary information can be quickly extracted, consolidated and reported to authorised users, eliminating time-consuming manual processes and the consolidation of spreadsheets,

Parrott comments,

“ABS’ system has significantly streamlined our budgeting processes and made it quicker and easier to produce reports. It used to take us approximately ten days to load, validate and consolidate budget data from various standalone spreadsheets. By automating these processes with ABS’ system we have reduced this to minutes, dramatically improving efficiency, whilst eliminating errors around data manipulation.”

Parrott adds,

“ABS’ system has helped to increase financial transparency and visibility at every stage of the budgeting cycle. With quicker access to financial data in a user-friendly format, this has assisted us to more accurately budget against Government performance targets whilst ensuring greater financial control and improved decision making.”

Going forward authorised users at Gloucester City Council will also be able to use ABS’ system to compare budgets to forecasts in real-time and easily input, process and view financial data directly from the desktop. This will enable issues connected with under and over spending to be addressed far earlier.

Gloucester City Council services the historic city’s population of approximately 56,000 households comprising of over 100,000 citizens. www.gloucester.gov.uk/

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