4 Features to Look For in a Government Budgeting Solution

There’s a number of options on the market to manage your government’s budget that selecting the best solution can get confusing. Spreadsheet budgeting, for example, is one approach that some agencies use although we don’t recommend it due to how limiting spreadsheets are and how much more tedious and painful it makes the budgeting process. In fact, no public agency should really be budgeting on spreadsheets in this day and age.
On the other side of the spectrum are a number of ERPs that are known for their fancy features and for being multifunctional across multiple departments, which can be a benefit especially for larger government agencies. However, budgeting is just a small component of ERP systems as they’re not built just to focus on the day-to-day work of budget managers. This is where ERP systems can sometimes become complicated and clunky for budget staff instead of simplified and budgeting-focused like GovMax.
GovMax is a budgeting-only solution created by veteran budget managers who understand the painful budgeting process and sought a solution that could make the process more efficient and less complicated. When Sarasota County developed GovMax, it was to solve our own budgeting headaches and to have a system that only focuses on budgeting and not other unrelated functions. Today, GovMax is commercially available to other agencies and has had a roster of satisfied customers since 2001.
If you’re in the market for a budgeting solution, there’s four key features that you should be looking for to choose the right solution that meet your budgeting needs.
4 Features to Look for in a Budgeting Solution
Easy Reporting
Convenient Budgeting Updates
Simplified Technology

Scenarios and Projections
When forecasting and planning budgets, creating budget scenarios is helpful with evaluating your forecasts, projections and actuals. Scenarios are useful for capital projects, projecting expenditures and testing the resiliency of your budget in uncertain times. So your budgeting solution should give you a wide range of options to create scenarios.
GovMax isn’t limited to budget forecasting and capital planning, it allows the creation of multifaceted scenarios and provides you with complete flexibility of creating different scenarios outside your operational budget. This helps you make data-driven decisions and determine the optimal combination of budget allocation for different departments in your agency.
GovMax is loaded with all these features and more, and it’s also the most affordable, user friendly and advanced government budgeting tool on the market. GovMax forecasts, automates, simplifies, consolidates, displays, and shares your budgeting with zero chaos; far better than what you can do with spreadsheets or other complicated systems.
To discuss your agency’s specific needs and see how GovMax fits with your requirements, email demo@govmax.org to schedule a demo.
