The City of Issaquah in Washington State has greatly expanded since its early years where mining and lumber played a significant role. Today the City has a population of 37,000 and is home to a number of large corporate offices including Microsoft, Boeing, and Costco.
The City of Issaquah will be implementing Questica Budget, Questica Performance, and Questica OpenBook, and will include integration with their Munis financial system.
Historically relying on Excel for their budgets, the City had several key areas they were looking to address in a new budget management system. The City’s Finance Director was familiar with the Questica and our software from previous roles, and realized we could provide right solutions to meet the City’s specific needs.
Finance was looking for a budgeting solution that would allow all departments to play a more collaborative and hands on role in budgeting. The Questica Budget workflow model easily provides departments insight into their budgets through each stage of budget preparation, approval, and tracking. This formal, structured method of transitioning the budget through each stage ensures integrity in the data.
By being able to pull data from anywhere in the system for analysis, the financial team’s time can be freed up from the tedium of data entry and re-entry. Data queries can be run and the data viewed in dashboards, or exported to any number of reports for better conversations and more informed decision-making.
OpenBook, Questica’s transparency and data visualization software will allow the City of Issaquah to share its data either internally and externally by displaying the information in easy-to-access and searchable charts, tables and graphs. The City’s capital projects will also be made available via the portal so stakeholders can see where investments are being made. An important tool for a rapidly growing community, Questica’s OpenBook will encourage more engagement and dialogue about the City’s priorities, plans and services with its constituents.
