We have recently been asked how we are accounting for expenses that do not run through the financial system or budget but which our leadership considers to be part of the contribution to a program (whether it's from the City or the community).
Two examples are:
Our City applies for a CDBG grant through the County. We have an agreement with the County to send a portion of our annual award to a local non-profit. Since those funds never reach the City's financial statements, they are not included in our program budget for local partnership funding.
We have a significant number of volunteer hours for departments including the museum, library and police department. Since there is no expense or revenue associated with those volunteer hours, they are not included in the budget, but some of our programs are benefiting from the use of volunteers and the full cost of the program is not captured since those hours are volunteered.
Has anyone else struggled with defining how these parts should be captured in the PBB Process?
Great question Earlene. I struggled with this as well in both Post Falls and Englewood where significant volunteer time contributed to the successful completion of programs. I did not determine how to include this in the PBB data but did have departments where these types of scenarios play out create a value statement sheet that we would take forward to the city council to indicate the great value from the volunteers as well as the offset in direct personnel costs to help achieve the successful program or service delivery
Hi Earlene, as a previous super user, I advised department users to include notes about a program having volunteers or in-kind services either within the program description or the comments. This way, when/if this program came up for review, we'd have the full-context. For example, we have a Friends of the Library. They support some of our library programs through volunteering. This was noted in the program description of the affected library programs.
For future budgets, we could also easily add "$1" cost personnel- as stand ins for the volunteers. We would need some value to go in there for proper display of time, and we could treat them as a single cluster for each program- i.e. United Way volunteers might appear as a single line item with 20 FTE and a cost of $1.
Thanks all for the feedback and ideas. I really like allowing departments to show the value of volunteers (we publish an estimate of those hours and the cost of volunteers in our annual budget.) I think it would be great for us to include those value statements in the description or as a tag on the program so that the information is kept for future years.
I'm not sure how well the $1 idea will work because our main concern is showing the true cost that is being spent on a program and allowing Council to see the value that the volunteer hours or other in-kind support adds to a program and which we would otherwise have to budget for if those things weren't being donated. We've toyed with the idea of adding both an expense and a revenue of donated time so that there is no impact to the "net" cost of the program, but it still allows Council and staff to show the cost of what our programs would be without the volunteer hours.