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Madison County auditors demonstrate budgeting software intended for FY27 rollout
Summary
County finance staff demonstrated a budgeting and charting platform that links to the county chart of accounts, offers interactive budget-vs-actual charts and Excel export, and could be rolled out to department heads within four to six weeks ahead of budget year 2027.
An auditor-department presenter updated the Madison County Council on a budgeting platform the county plans to use for budget year 2027. The presenter said the system links directly to the county chart of accounts and produces interactive trend charts showing budgeted versus actual amounts across years, with drilldowns by fund and expense type.
The presenter told the council the software can show multi-year trends (the demonstration used 2020 through 2026), isolate salary and benefit lines, and reveal where budgeted and actual figures diverged. "In real time it then has updated our chart," the presenter said, describing the ability to hover over each year to see numbers and to toggle lines for salaries or benefits. He added the platform saves user-created views and folders and supports role-based permissions for editors, contributors and reviewers.
Council members asked how the system would map to the existing budget book and whether departments could continue working in Excel. The presenter said the platform offers hierarchical permissions and an exportable worksheet that can be saved to Excel so departments can continue familiar workflows. "If it's easier to then work in Excel ... it would then populate all of these assigned items and bring it out," he said.
The presenter proposed a phased rollout: training department heads, assigning user roles and enabling liaison reviews. He estimated a 4-to-6-week timeline to have department heads trained and users set up for the next budgeting cycle. The presenter also noted the tool can store supporting documentation attached to line items so reviewers can open and download files tied to budget requests.
The council did not take a formal vote on implementation at the meeting; members asked the auditor's office to coordinate training dates and confirmed the next steps would be scheduling department head sessions and preparing user accounts.
