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Brimbank City Council controls budget cycle *

Brimbank is the fourth fastest growing municipality in metropolitan Melbourne. This growth brings a need to streamline existing business practices and the immediate challenge was to re engineer a manually intensive budgeting process. Brimbank City Council has selected AXS-One’s BCM (Budget Cycle Management) to automate its budgeting process.

Council’s previous system was manually intensive, taking 12 weeks and 100 working days effort from the Finance Department. The new system, when fully implemented, will provide the Council with a dramatic reduction in their budgeting cycle, from weeks to days.

BCM streamlines the budgeting function via online integration between the Council’s existing financial system, AXS-One Financials, and MS Excel. It also allows Brimbank to take advantage of the workflow rules engine to tightly control and monitor the entire budget process.

The Council can now automatically populate a user defined Excel template with relevant information from its financials, such as posting account, historical actual/budget information. It then electronically routes the excel templates to the appropriate budget officers/budget approving managers.

The system allows the Council to monitor the exact location and status of budget templates to streamline the follow up process. At the end of the approval process the approved budget data is automatically uploaded into the financial system.

AXS-One’s BCM allows Brimbank City Council to meet their stated objectives which include the following.

• The ability to do financial modelling which was previously unachievable.
• Provide a speedier method of extracting and importing the data into the financials.
• Give the users an easy and fast way of entering data into the system.
• Be able, at any point in time, to see the future budget as a working document without continually having to upload information.
• Allow changes to the spreadsheets when the budget is assessed by Executives, without causing a large amount of administration work.
• Ensure that the data being downloaded and uploaded is correct.
• Decrease the amount of time spent on the process by the Accounting Team.

* Copy supplied by AXS-One

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