All right, so on to finance.

Uh starting on page 28.

Basically, the directors only uh the there's no operating budget for the director, so any um increases all salary and uh that's it.

Uh the next page, page 29 is uh Department of Finance and Administration.

That's the um accounting and all of the finance people.

Um we've kept the same operating budget on that too.

So the only thing we have are increases, salary increases, and there are some uh actual salary increases in here.

Some of my salaried staff, and the the idea is to bring the salaried staff up to the level of to where they're uh commensurate with the non-salaried staff that they're whose work they're reviewing and who they're working with.

And um I've got I've got a pretty new staff, but uh they're all uh I've had a lot of I've had turnover in the last few years, and many of my people left do for better salaries.

Um I'm trying to hang on to this new staff.

I've got a new staff, and they're all really good, they're doing a great job.

There they are, they're the only ones in this room other than us.

Well, you know, I think we have to start thinking about the competition.

Right.

In order to keep the people whatever that quote reason and that new way of things would we have to stay at our salary level increase to keep good people here to do good jobs.

Right.

If you don't get people that can't do the job, we fill them a position.

That's what we don't want.

Well, and yeah, you lose institutional knowledge every time somebody leaves.

Somebody else has to come in completely from scratch and learn governmental accounting.

So governmental accounting, I think.

And uh our grant accountant is handling um, he came in here thinking he was gonna handle about 1520 grants and the ARP grant, and he's got um well.

Let's see.

And he's handling a hundred million in grant in grant revenues right now.

So he's doing a lot more than he expected to be doing.

Thank you.

Mark's back there, Mark Matlock.

Uh other than that, uh, any questions on finance?

Next page, yeah.

Payroll.

Payroll is the next page.

Um we're just the only thing that's different on the payroll page is we added about $500 for more training, and you see we didn't use this year's training.

Uh that's because we've been short staffed pretty much the whole year, and uh we finally got three people on staff, and uh we're trying to encourage them all to get certified and uh to just continue their education and training, and uh we also need some money in there for just keeping up with law changes and things like that.

So that's the only change to the payroll budget.

You want to show you the graph?

Okay.

Uh looks on the graph, it looks like we're pretty much level, and most of that is because of gaps in staffing, you know.

So we spent less money this year than we sh thought we would because we had some openings during the year in a few of the positions, so uh across the payroll and finance.

Next we have the purchasing department.

Uh I thought I'd call Jeannie Ardillo up for the purchasing department.

She can talk about some of the things she's doing.

Hello.

This was one of the positions that was vacant.

Lisa said it was vacant until about the middle of April.

So I came from a government background, government accounting background too.

So the position interests me because it needed a lot of changes and upgrades.

So some of the things that started was a process analysis, and we moved towards electronic record management and contract management.

This is obviously with the directness and guidance of Theresa's help me, Lisa's help me, everybody's helped me.

And we're just we updated the purchasing thresholds, which gave way to a lot of efficiency and paper and time for the staff and brought us up to parallel third-class cities.

Sorry, I'm nervous.

I never come up here.

And I am very nervous.

I don't want to forget anything because there's been so much.

We started the utilization of a pen mid platform, which gives us access to a lot of vendors and helps open up more competitive bidding.

Let's see, the pen record management, and we also are awaiting an update or in the process of updating our finance plus accounting system so that the current purchase order system can tie into our accounting system giving us tighter internal controls over purchasing as well.

So and I want to get so I can analyze some commodities and work on bulk pricing and some piggyback pricing with maybe some other nonprofit organizations that are close to us.

So there's lots of work and lots of updates that can be done to this position in this department, which is me.

Okay, so the next department is.

Right.

So yeah, hopefully, you know, we just put a little bit of extra in this budget for things that might occur.