Late last year, the city of Tigard, Ore., a Portland suburb with an annual budget of about $240 million, began using cloud-based budgeting technology from Euna Solutions, known as Euna Budget. That has made it easier for city officials to compile reports, manage finances and track changes.
“This technology is reducing staff time through multiple avenues, both at the front end and back end of the systems,” Kimberlee Ables, Tigard communications manager, said in an email.
Data is more easily imported and exported across the city’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool, allowing “both users and administrators to report on and look at variance analysis at a detailed level within their own budgets and see trends over years,” Ables said.
“We imported and reconciled both Budgets and Actuals dating back to FY2023 to be able to use historical trends to forecast future budgets and create and utilize dashboards to report on and keep track of line-item specific budgets,” she said.
To fully understand the impact of introducing new technology into budgeting and finance, it helps to understand how manual and analogue the processes have traditionally been, a tedious network of spreadsheets and other documents, often disconnected.
In fact, 39 percent of public-sector finance departments still rely on spreadsheets to manage their budgeting process, according to the Euna Solutions 2025 State of Public Budgeting Report.
Modern budgeting and finance technology can bring budget data together in a centralized system, making it easier to manage and share.
“The bottom line is, it’s forcing all of your data into a single structure … and it’s securing it, because it’s in our system,” Mykola Konrad, Euna Solutions chief product officer, said.
Administrators’ ability to integrate real-time actual revenue and expenses against budgeted amounts and build reports, providing insights into trends, aids in management, city officials said.
The process of developing the annual proposed budget has been an often manual, malleable task involving Excel spreadsheets shared among various officials.
“However, if those numbers changed throughout the budgeting cycle and process, more spreadsheets would need to be created, and imported, and then checked line by line to make sure that the edits and updates were reflected correctly in the system,” Ables said.
Euna Budget allows data sets — which used to be those spreadsheets — to now live directly in the system, updated on demand in multiple locations.
“This makes validation seamless and saves the city an immeasurable amount of time within the budgeting process,” Ables said. “This is really important when changes are happening at such a quick pace to make sure that your ‘source of truth’ is reflected accurately within your public-facing document.”
Transparency, particularly in areas such as finance, is something many local governments want to improve. Digital budgeting tools can go beyond the creation of public-facing webpages to other products, Konrad said.
“Once you know you have a store of data, and it’s accurate, and it’s being updated on a regular basis, and is correct … it just makes all those citizen-facing dashboards more accurate,” he said.
Some cities are using Euna application programming interfaces to get the data directly to their websites, for transparency initiatives. The ability to bring budget data into one central location and then make it understandable and relevant for end uses — by elected officials or the public — is a move in the direction of better government, Konrad said.
"It allows you to adhere to standards, and yet publish everything transparently so that your citizens actually have access to it,” he said, noting the technology also lets city officials model the impacts of raises or other changes to the budget. “We automatically calculate all of that. So it’s not this jumbled spreadsheet that’s trying to pull in multiple different tabs.”
Other cities with relatively small populations are turning to digital government tools to aid in financial management. Ketchum, Idaho, uses a digital payments system from Ramp*, a platform for managing and reconciling credit card payments, invoices and other pieces of bookkeeping necessary to the public and private sectors.
Staffers were spending at least 20 hours a month reconciling credit card purchases, Brent Davis, Ketchum finance director, said in January. City workers were tasked with holding on to receipts and turning them in to the finance department.
“Government folks tend to shy away from change. I tend to run toward it,” Davis said.
*Ramp technology is also used by e.Republic, Government Technology's parent company.
