"Connecting costs and outcomes associated with specific services is critical to communicating value to citizens!"
Program budgeting is an underlying assumption to many of GFOA's budgeting best practices and being able to connect costs and outcomes associated with specific services is critical to communicating value to citizens.
However, very few governments actually do this fundamental piece well for a number of reasons, including poor definition of programs and technical challenges in accounting for programs.
Why?
Well, for one, we’ve never had a tool to make it easy…
At the CPBB, we created an approach to developing Program Inventory and Program Costs when we were in local government - because nothing existed to meet our needs. It was self-serving! What we found, was that it was the gateway dataset to Priority Based Budgeting!
Getting to a program level understanding of "what you do," and a transparent and accurate understanding of "how much it costs" to provide those programs is a critical ingredient for understanding what options you have as an organization to change what you're currently doing.
The only way to get to the answer of questions like "can we do this program more efficiently," or "are we the best source to provide this service," or "are we recovering the costs for providing this service, both direct and indirect costs" requires a complete understanding of what the program is, and how much it costs.
The key is a user-friendly, web-based Program Inventory & Program Costing user-interface. It links directly with your line-item budget, flows through your payroll data, and generates easy to update Program Costs. Your worksheets are protected and stored on the cloud, providing web accessibility to your organization!
We created this innovative new web tool because our partner organizations wanted an easy to use, web-based tool that would easily connect to your financial system to update the data, and give you:
- a tool that allows you to evaluate the fees, rates and charges that you have on a program-by-program basis,
- a tool that allows you to make ready comparisons to other public-sector, or private sector service providers, to the extent that you want to evaluate the efficiency or the appropriate sourcing of your programs,
- a tool that brings departments into the process of understanding and communicating better what they do, and how much it costs, on a program level,
- a tool that can allow you to see clearly how your workforce is associated with programs (do you have retirement eligible staff serving a particular program, and are you aware of how you'll address succession planning?, for example),
- and ultimately a tool that helps transition your approach (or the department's approach) from line-item budgeting to program budgeting
The GFOA Best Practice for "Measuring the the Full Cost of Government Service" was created over a decade ago... At a time when this data-driven practice, this "evolution" from line-item budgeting is so valuable, so vital to our community's success, we wanted a Tool to make this far easier. We wanted to make it accessible. We wanted it in everybody's hands!
Program Inventory and Costing made easy - by CPBB!
Find out MORE and contact US about our web-based Program Inventory and Program Costing Tool!
Learn more at CPBB's Know the cost of your #localgov services! CPBB presenting at the GFOA conference!
Center for Priority Based Budgeting
2015 Annual Conference
Denver, Colorado | August 4 - 6, 2015
Sheraton Downtown Denver Hotel
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