Streamlining the Budget Process: Albany International Airport Embraces Technology.

• Author: Zonsius, Michael F.

Make technology fit your needs, rather than making your needs fit technology. Embrace it!

Everyone is familiar with the budget process diagram that shows a circle made up of four arrows: it's a repetitive process done every year, over, and over, and over. And this kind of repetition is a perfect fit for technology.

At the Albany County (New York) International Airport, the budget preparation process typically begins each year when an organization distributes the same spreadsheet to each of its department managers. The spreadsheet format includes four columns: the previous year actual results, current budget amounts, estimated current year projections, and next year's requested budget, account line by account line. Each department then completes the last column and returns the spreadsheet to the budget department, which in turn merges all the departments' spreadsheets into one consolidated budget document. This process has worked for many years, but using the right technology can make it work more efficiently and with greater accuracy.

A NEED FOR CHANGE

Recognizing that the budget information received from each department was often late, and frequently the same as the previous year, the airport's finance department set out to create an in-house budget software program. One goal was to enter data once and only once, centralizing all input budget data in one database, thereby eliminating the use of multiple spreadsheets or subsidiary ledgers. Spreadsheets are phenomenal financial tools, but they are not databases, which allow information to be easily sorted and grouped for reporting purposes year after year.

Let's face it: The joys of reporting in a database can be compared to pounding railroad spikes with a mallet versus a screwdriver. And another goal was to reduce the time and anguish a department manager spends preparing the budget, allowing them to maximize the time spent attending to their department's specialized needs.

The budget for the year ending December 31, 2021, began as a zero-based budget, and the detailed line items were then added in each account for that initial year. In subsequent years, the detail is retained and rolled over into the next year's budget cycle, so this information does not need to be re-entered each year, merely manipulated with either quantity or unit cost differences.

The finance department created software that prepares the annual budget for each department, listing their accounts with multiple detailed...