07-31-19 #2 - Laserfiche WebLink

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•CITYOFSOUTHBEND OFFICE OF THE CLERK right now they look something like this (referencing a slide in the presentation). They are two hundred to three hundred (200-300) pages of this. We want to make sure our reporting is useful, helpful to both residents and to Council Members. So that's a major build out that we're working on with the Finance team. We want to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our financial processes while making sure that we are strengthening our internal controls. So, with the accounting software DFO implementation that Denise mentioned, we are revisiting all of our processes and policies, making sure that those policies are as effective as they can be. In addition, we are in the process of putting together, and will continue in 2020, an asset replacement schedule plan so that we know capital assets that we have on hand, when we can expect those to come due for replacement and maintenance so we can better budget for those capital needs on an ongoing basis. The last goal is to plan for long term financial stability. Part of this is making sure that we maintain a strong level of cash reserves. One(1) metric that I think I'll look at quite a bit, we'll introduce in a more formal way, is something called day's cash on hand. It's actually how long the City could operate given our current level of expenditures with no additional revenue coming in. So, how much cash do we have on hand?And we want to make sure that's over four hundred(400) days on an ongoing basis. And that's a metric that we'll be presenting to Council and to the public, it gives a good handle on what our true cash reserves and our ability to handle financial down turns is. And then developing and updating five (5)-year financial plans for departments and making sure their sustainable in the long term. He continued, From a budget overview perspective, there's a couple slides that I have on here because they are obviously our operations, this is our department and our department operations, but there are a few funds that only Admin and Finance touches and I wanted to make sure that Council saw those as well. From our operations perspective,there's actually a decrease from 2019's budget. This is largely due to an accounting reorganization. I'll talk about it in more in a second. What we did is we split out Diversity and Inclusion and Human Resources into their own departments, divisions essentially, so that they have their own budgets separate from the Administration and Finance budget. This is to improve transparency and make sure that Council understands how much we're spending on those particular areas. And truly, operationally, they have a different reporting structure, so it makes sense operationally as well. We also pulled into this budget from the Central Services budget, Central Purchasing, which again is more reflective of our actual operational reporting structure. And I want to highlight as I said,the additional funds that only Admin and Finance tends to deal with. One (1) of those is the Liability and Insurance Fund. Similar to what Denise was saying with the IT fund, this is another one(1)of those internal service funds where there is targeted spend down of cash reserves. Our budget of expenditures in this fund are assuming losses larger than those seen in recent years. So, we budget fairly conservatively. This fund accounts for workers compensation, as well as our liability. So, if we have liability claims that we need to pay out on, that's where this fund accounts for. The actual losses are not close to where we budget because we budget fairly conservatively. What that means is because we are spending out less than we are budgeting is that the cash balance of this fund continues to grow. And we want to make sure we are not continuing that and the way to do that is to budget for a targeted spend down in those reserve requirements. The balance projected is being assessed at$3, almost$4 million at the beginning of 2020. The reserve requirement is closer to $2 million, so we want to make sure that we're spending that down as appropriate. He went on, Just want to quickly go through this (referencing a slide in the presentation), this is the debt service fund for the whole City. Largely maintaining debt service. We haven't issued any EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building'227 W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574 235 9173 TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 5