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OpenGov, a software company based in Redwood City, CA, set a new standard for governments looking to streamline their budgeting. The company’s cutting edge, easy-to-use budgeting solution improves the entire budgeting process by bringing it online into the cloud and replacing complicated Excel spreadsheets. The result has been better budgeting, improved reporting, and operational excellence.
“We are committed to helping government organizations strengthen their approaches to smart budgeting with an end-to-end budgeting solution—the Smart Government Platform,” said Zac Bookman, OpenGov’s CEO and Co-founder. “Our platform integrates budgeting, management reporting, and open data so governments can plan, operate, and communicate with elected bodies and citizens more effectively and accurately.” The company’s Smart Government PlatformTM includes OpenGov Budget BuilderTM and the recently-announced OpenGov Budget BookTM powered by Wdesk.
With OpenGov Budget Builder, Connie streamlined Burnet’s budgeting process with real-time access to accurate financial data—significantly increasing transparency, enhancing data integrity, and encouraging cooperation while saving valuable time and resources. By moving budgeting into a collaborative cloud-based environment, OpenGov Budget Builder replaced Burnet’s traditional approach of scrutinizing numerous time-consuming spreadsheets and enduring lengthy proposal submission cycles, thereby enabling teams to approach the budgeting process cross-functionally.
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We will delve deeper into budgeting, operational intelligence, and open data to deliver the most complete platform for improved government performance
Once finalized, the software can convert the budget into monthly departmental budget-to-actual reports, which enable the department heads, the city manager, and finance staff to track the city’s performance against its budget plan. Leveraging both OpenGov Budget Builder and the broader Smart Government Platform, Connie and her team ensured that Burnet had the best-in-class technology infrastructure it needed to effectively plan for the city’s future, deliver unique services, and engage stakeholders within and beyond the organization.
OpenGov works with over 1,400 local governments, state agencies, school districts, and special districts to help them improve their data-driven decision-making and their performance across planning, budgeting, and operating. The company prides itself on its in-house Government Finance Solution (GFS) team comprised of veteran finance directors who guide their product roadmap and offer customers meaningful insights.
Going forward, OpenGov will continue working with its customers to deliver modern, easy-to-use government performance solutions that help governments address the challenges they face. As public sector leaders constantly strive to do more with less, they increasingly require on-demand information to make confident and informed decisions about the tradeoffs they face each day. To that end, Bookman said, “We will delve deeper into budgeting, operational intelligence, and open data to deliver the most complete platform for improved government performance.”
Publications is a powerful templatized, no-code solution to seamlessly create online, interactive, accessible, and printable reports and narrative stories directly from the OpenGov Cloud. Publications enables governments to control the narrative by combining first-party data, enhanced graphing and visualizations with written context to make budgets, projects, and agency performance come to life for communities, councils, and departments. Users can create a Publication once and then set it to be point-in-time or update automatically, depending on the use case of a given report.
"OpenGov Publications is a game-changer for local and state governments," said Zac Bookman, founder and CEO of OpenGov. "We've expanded our public reporting capabilities so every department has the tools to communicate program effectiveness proactively with the public. At OpenGov, we're committed to providing the best tools and ensuring our customers' success. This new feature is the latest way we're helping local governments strengthen public trust."
Since its introduction, more than 130 agencies across the country are using Publications to create more than 300 online publications. These include Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) award-winning budget books, capital improvement programs, health updates, Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax project updates, safety department performance, asset condition reports, innovation and performance portals, and more. For example, The City of Phoenix is fighting the opioid epidemic and using OpenGov Publications to report resources the City is dedicating to overdose prevention and overdoses over time.
Key Features of OpenGov Publications:
• User-Friendly Editor: An innovative no-code, templatized editor with rich content elements such as charts, tables, images, maps, and videos. Users can opt for customizable layouts or pre-built templates, all optimized for mobile accessibility.
• Flexible Design Styles: Flexible templates make incorporating design and style guides simple so your Publications look and feel like the rest of the agency website.
• Automatically Generating Online Table of Contents: The Table of Contents will generate automatically, can be configured to every project's needs, and update automatically as changes are made.
• Configurable Navigation Bar: Set what the public sees and how they see it to create a unified agency brand.
• Engagement Built-in: Run surveys and scenarios and collect feedback from the public to ensure the community's voice is in every key decision.
• Accessible to All: Rigorous and continuous testing is done to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA and American Disabilities Act (ADA) standards, with a commitment to equitable access for all users.
• Easily Customized PDFs: Control margins, headers, footers, and other key features of PDF exports and printing.
• Available in Every Language: Built-in Google Translate means Publications are automatically available and accessible to every constituent.
"Every customer using Publications right now is inspired to share more data proactively with their residents and departments because the portal is just so intuitive," said Terrence Curley, Chief Product Officer of OpenGov. "This capability simplifies the publication process, allowing our customers to focus on strategic priorities rather than the administrative burdens typically associated with creating budget books and other important publications."