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BACKGROUND In October 2008, the Finance department solicited proposals for an automated Operating and Capital Budget software system to replace the current paper based Excel process. Six proposals were received and reviewed by staff. Questica Inc, was selected based on their 10 years of experience in the public sector and over 40 municipal clients. Questica's TeamBudget software, offers aweb-based budget platform that will provide seamless integration with the City's existing financial and payroll systems, as well as the ability to provide: detail line item budgeting capability, multiple year budgeting, automated notification of changes to the budget during the budget process, unlimited versioning and 'what if scenarios, lock down control during any stage in the budget process, and will provide automated labor costing for all personnel and benefits. In addition, TeamBudget is compatible with and meets Information Technology's platform requirement of operating with Microsoft SQL 2005 ; IIS 5.x and above. DISCUSSION During the two-year budget process, each department inputs their budget request into an Excel spreadsheet and then submits their budget electronically to Finance. Finance receives over 300 separate department/program budgets via this method. Upon receiving each department input, Finance reviews the department request and in many situations contacts the department to make adjustments. This results in the department editing their spreadsheet and re-submitting to Finance. The edited budget is manually reviewed again and what started out as 300 departmenUprogram budgets to review grows to 350 or more. Once the department budget is approved by Finance, the department data is copied into a separate spreadsheet so the data can be uploaded into the General Ledger. Not only is this process very time consuming, it involves many manual checks to the budget spreadsheet and contact with each department. Moreover, since the spreadsheets are not web-based there is no way to monitor department budget requests electronically, Finance can not generate a top level summary or status until all budgets have been received from the departments. This creates inefficiencies, as Staff must resort to manual reviews and estimates to provide budget status during the budget process. The proposed purchase would provide a comprehensive City-wide integrated budget process that will greatly enhance Finance's ability to monitor the budget process, reduce numerous manual checks, and provide more timely data to the departments and City Manager. This software will also be used for all budget updates including Mid-year and Mid-term. TeamBudget software also contains a module for Capital budgeting, which will offer the same efficiency/processing benefits to the Excel based CIP program budget, as well. Page 2 of 3