Earthquakes and other natural disasters can be costly if your area is directly affected, and even more so if your government is unprepared. Your government may have an emergency response plan, but as financial managers, have you been included in some of those discussions? This article outlines steps governments can take to financially prepare for potentially large earthquakes and other disasters.
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Monitoring your overtime costs allows you to detect irregularities, such as a mistake or system glitch that might have resulted in overpayments. You can also see if the overtime that employees are working is significant and then assess whether it is sustainable. Before you start monitoring your overtime costs, you first need to establish expectations for a reasonable range of overtime activity. Then, compare your expectations to the actual data and follow up on any variances. In this article, SAO offers tips to help you monitor your overtime data.
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Local governments track many assets with multiple objectives in mind. Whether your objective is accurate and complete financial reporting or safeguarding public assets, tracking all of your government’s assets can quickly become a pain. SAO offers tools and resources to help you simplify asset tracking and comply with a variety of objectives and requirements.
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The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) established the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (CSLFRF) program, administered by the U.S. Treasury, Assistance Listing Number 21.027. One eligible use of these program funds allows governments to replace lost revenue in order to avoid cuts in their services.
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We know local governments face significant challenges this year. The Center for Government Innovation can help governments be well informed when making difficult financial decisions.
… CONTINUE READING → A new reporting feature in the Financial Intelligence Tool makes it simple for a local government to project its data into the future.
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The interactions between customer and cashier have become complicated by the pandemic. How do you collect payments but keep everyone safe? If you are exploring your options, here are some resources that might help you.
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We’re jumping into some lessons learned from the 2020 filing season regarding Schedule 06 – Summary of Bank Reconciliations. Even if you don’t file a Schedule 06, these tips are useful when preparing any bank reconciliation, or other schedules or reports. These were identified as the most common areas of emphasis when SAO staff helped clients in 2020.
… CONTINUE READING → The Financial Intelligence Tool’s (FIT) financial health indicators provide “retrospective” measures of financial health based on historic data. However, any government can use these measures to help plan for the future.
… CONTINUE READING → Our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) has long offered a way for users to examine data on specific governments, government types, and specific revenue or expenditure streams. For the first time, FIT has a way to view all important information on a specific government type in one place, using new government-type profiles.
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