Palm Bay finance unveils 'Budget Runner' tracker to give departments daily budget visibility

Finance staff on Oct. 9 demonstrated a new in‑house funding‑tracking tool dubbed the Budget Runner, which the city says will provide departments daily updates on authorization requests, purchase orders and invoices and will support public reporting on department budgets and grant tracking.

Budget program administrator Jessica Henchman and budget analyst Shane Bird presented the tool to City Council and described it as a centralized program for tracking funding requests, purchase requisitions, purchase orders and invoices. Bird said the platform—built in‑house by budget staff—will enable department‑specific logins, multi‑factor authentication and dashboards that show the phase of projects, current budget status and interdepartmental links on multi‑department projects.

Bird demonstrated prototype screens and said the tool will be compatible with the city's new Workday enterprise resource system in the future. He acknowledged the system is a work in progress, described a few demo issues during the meeting and said a quarterly governance dashboard will be presented to council showing authorization‑request status, grant tracking and project phases.

Council members congratulated the finance team for building the tool internally and noted it could reduce outside consulting costs. City staff said reports produced by the tool will be available to the public on a quarterly basis and will support the council’s goals for transparency and project tracking.

The presentation was informational; council did not vote on the tool and staff said they will continue development and testing before full rollout.