Gloucester Council targets budgeting system

The software has helped the council to reduce its budget loading time "from ten days to just minutes" and to better monitor, evaluate and improve its financial performance by replacing spreadsheets.

Janet Parrott, financial planning accountant at Gloucester City Council, said: "It used to take several members of the finance team over a week to complete their budget loading by collating information from various Excel spreadsheets. This process was extremely inefficient, prone to errors and didn't provide us with an accurate picture of our finances."

The web-based Advanced Business Solutions (ABS) budgeting and forecasting system has been integrated into Gloucester City Council's existing ABS financial management system.

The additional system enables the creation and real-time monitoring of financial plans and forecasts. Budgetary information can be quickly extracted, consolidated and reported to authorised users, eliminating time-consuming manual processes and the consolidation of spreadsheets.

Parrott said, "ABS' system has helped to increase financial transparency and visibility at every stage of the budgeting cycle. With quicker access to financial data in a user-friendly format, this has assisted us to more accurately budget against government performance targets whilst ensuring greater financial control and improved decision making."