Denver finance staff demo Workday-based spending dashboard as council urges deeper drilldowns and quarterly data

City finance staff demonstrated a draft, Workday-driven dashboard intended to give Denver City Council and the public easier access to agency budgets and expenditure details, and council members responded with a mixture of praise and requests for deeper drilldowns and clearer context.

"Workday is a system of record for the City. So, that means that is the official source for our financial record," said Bill Rydell, City Controller in the Department of Finance, as he described the enterprise system that holds payroll, procurement, grants and the general ledger. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephanie Carianas Adams and Lisa Martinez Templeton, the city's chief economist and data scientist, joined Rydell to show a proof-of-concept dashboard built from Workday data and other public sources such as Transparent Denver.

The dashboard demo showed agency budget totals, fund-level spend versus budget and filters by cost center and account code (personnel, services and supplies, capital equipment, internal services). It used 2023 data in the demo. Rydell told the committee that Workday already stores large volumes of transactions: "we pay about 110,000 vendor invoices every year," "over 330,000 paychecks," roughly "over 40,000 purchasing and travel card transactions" and "over 50,000 accounting transactions," all of which can be the source for reporting and drilldown.

Why it matters: Council members said the tool could make oversight…