Finance committee debates hiring finance director and tighter PO/AP, trial-balance and reporting controls

LaSalle County’s Finance Committee on March 4 discussed creating a finance director position and improving financial controls, including implementing a purchase-order (PO) module, an accounts-payable (AP) workflow and monthly close procedures.

"I think we should hire a finance director only because there are more reports that can be developed and done by that finance director," a committee member said during discussion of staffing and systems. Committee members said a finance director could help design and deploy a PO/AP system, tighten monthly closes so a given month’s trial balance does not change later and produce several standard reports needed for budgeting.

Committee members described current problems: invoices arriving after month close that change earlier months’ trial balances; difficulty producing trend analyses by month; and lengthy trial-balance reports they said were hard to use. Several members urged a staged implementation: pilot the PO module in one office, document procedures in the auditor’s office, and then roll out to other departments. The committee discussed training with the county’s software vendor and said audit staff could help document procedures.

The committee also considered giving a county staff member report-only access to the financial system so that staff could run custom reports for budgeting while preventing edits. "I'm asking only for report access—I don't want to change anything," the staff member said; the committee voted later in the meeting to permit report-only access (see Votes at a glance). Members discussed licensing and remote access (VPN) required to enable that access on a county laptop.

Nut graf: The committee framed the hiring of a finance director as a multi-year project tied to systems implementation; members asked for a job description at the next meeting and identified concrete next steps for monthly closings, PO/AP rollout and training.

Members asked that year-to-date monthly trial balances be available for department heads to prepare budgets and recommended starting the next budget cycle in June so departments can use monthly actuals. The committee did not adopt a final job description at this meeting but directed staff and committee leaders to meet and produce a description for next month.

Ending: The item stays on next month’s agenda; members asked that a finance-director job description and a project plan for PO/AP implementation be available at the next meeting.