HARFORD COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS TRANSITION TO AN AUTOMATED BUDGET PACKAGE

The HCPS budget office has utilized secondary systems to produce the exhibits for the annual published budget presentation in the past.  An access database has retained the information for the current and historical budgets, actual expenditures and full time employee staffing.  The Hyperion product was utilized each fall to project the future employee costs for step and cost of living (COLA) raises the board of education would propose in their budget. 

  

Harford County Public Schools (HCPS) has managed the fiscal reporting systems with Lawson Financial products.  The current fiscal reports are structured to report the status of the budget and actuals in the Maryland State Department Education (MSDE) reporting format. The budget office met with representatives from Lawson to describe the 2 reporting needs to be addressed by HCPS. We needed to be able to report the budget status by the expenditures occurring within MSDE categories and by the major HCPS programs.  The Lawson Budget Module or LBP appears to offer many of the attributes we needed but not all of them. 

 We wanted a system that could forecast step and cost of living (COLA) increases, and would take care of school based allocated expenses. The school based allocation effects approximately 20 types of expenses and is allocated based on the number of students, teachers or square footage. We worked with our consultant and had models developed that are dependent on these three variables, which can be updated, run and then uploaded into LBP.

Our group consisting of Mary Edmunds, Edward Fields, Michelle Sledge and Jeannine Ravenscraft , who have exported the current years (FY13 Budget) and future years (FY14 Budget) to the LBP module to capture the fiscal data. We extracted the workforce data from the Lawson Financial System. The step and COLA raises were projected via the workforce and the school allocations. This data was used to balance to the proposed budget.  We have to run a parallel system utilizing the Access database until the beginning of July when we will officially switch over to LBP.

The LBP module did not produce the exhibits in the format we need for our annual published budget presentation and we have worked with the consultant to extract the data via Crystal Reports to satisfy this component of our budget book. We also had to have the consultant develop a crystal report to send the annual budget request out to each of our budget managers to complete and send back to our division with their subsequent years budget request. 

In summary it will save time in Budget preparation and eliminate the need for the Hyperion product as the Budget Office was the only area using this software.

For additional information contact Ed Fields or Jim Jewell at Harford County Public Schools.