|
|
Residents Can Track Glendale's Budget Through "Follow Your Money" Tool
Glendale residents can follow the city of Glendale's budget through a comprehensive tool, "Follow Your Money," available on the website. This easy-to-use budget
tool enhances transparency and allows users to access the city's expense and revenue financial data to see clearly what's coming in and what's going out.
In 2010, the Arizona State Legislature passed Arizona Revised Statute (A.R.S.) ยง41-725, which established online comprehensive financial reporting requirements
for Arizona and its local municipalities. Although Glendale was in compliance with the statute through the publishing of its Comprehensive Annual Financial
Report on the city website, the city's Information Technology and Finance departments took the statute requirements for the state as a guide and created Follow
Your Money to further promote transparency. The first phase of the tool was released to the public July 2012.
"With Follow Your Money, we have attempted to make a very complex financial system extremely easy for anyone to use and understand," stated Diana Bundschuh,
deputy chief information technology officer. "We wanted something that people would use, that provided full transparency to the public and the ability for them to
see every detail of the city's spending."
The first phase of Follow Your Money provided users the ability to easily search and download the current year's expenditure data as well as the previous three
fiscal years. Searches can be conducted by fund, department and citywide spending along with vendor spending. The tool provides a graph that shows total
expenditures of the search and users may select how much data to view at once and how it is sorted, alphabetically or by amount. Users can also access spending
on a specific date or payments to specific vendors; and Follow Your Money is updated every 24 hours.
The second phase of Follow Your Money provides users with a substantial amount of enhancements to the first phase. Now users may also compare how city
departments are performing against their budgets. It provides quarterly financial performance data for the selected fiscal year and previous three fiscal years
in a graphical format that shows quarterly actuals versus budget data for expenditures and revenues.
While phase one focused on detailed information, phase two provides the amended budget, actuals, percentage of total budget and a three-year actual average for
each quarter. All this information is also presented with a bar chart for easy comparisons. The second phase provides an overall look at the city's budget that
includes expenditures, revenues and all the city's financial funds that didn't exist in phase one.
Both phases of Follow Your Money are now up and running and ready to be used at
www.glendaleaz.com/FollowYourMoney.
|
|
League of Arizona Cities and Towns
1820 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85007
Phone: 602-258-5786
Fax: 602-253-3874
http://www.azleague.org
|
|
|
