Budgeting Guide for County Leaders

The NACo IT Advisory Council is developing layman’s guides for county elected officials, as well as other county executive leadership to help raise the awareness and understanding of the technology that is needed to support county essential functions. This guide focuses on Budgeting and focuses on a series of questions to ask that will include the risk or missed opportunity if not implemented.

Purpose

As an Elected Official – Budgeting is a vital component of effective county government practices. The areas of procurement, contracts and grants are integral to supporting the budgeting process throughout its lifecycle. These three areas are key to:

• Promoting fiscal responsibility
• Identifying priorities
• Helping to allocate or assign technology resources appropriately and more efficiently
• Ensuring that the expenditures of the county are reasonable
• Helping the county to plan for the coming year
• Identifying where there might be risks or gaps between revenue and expenditures
• Compelling departments to determine what is desirable versus what is essential
• Identifying if there is project duplication across departments
• Promoting transparency of the use of county funds, and
• Enabling a county to analyze spending from year to year and make more informed decisions

The guide's sections are divided into the benefits of streamlining and coordinating these three areas of procurement, budgeting, and grants, as well as the questions that county leaders should be asking.

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