Or council feels unified says, Yeah, we want to make these as policies.

We we can do that.

But right now what we call them part of the reason they did this, I like it.

And the other reason is anytime you go get uh rating for bonds, they want to look at your financial policies.

So I kind of copied what you know, read some other cities, what they had, read GFOA, government finance officers, they have some guidelines and put these together.

But I think it's good that you know what they are because they go in our budget every year.

We had kind of adopt them as part of our budget.

Um, but I also don't want to think it's like this isn't like city code or anything.

This is when putting the budget together, we want to keep these things in mind.

Um, and these are the seven categories, and we'll just look at these.

I don't think this will take too long.

Budgeting.

So some of them are pretty obvious.

We want to have balanced budgets, right?

We have whatever we budget in revenues is what we can budget in expenditures.

Now, that being said, realize that if we have surplus from a previous year and we want to budget that as a capital project in the next year, your butt your budget is still balanced.

Like you're using like using reserves is okay to balance your budget.

It's not a good idea maybe necessarily for your general fund.

So I I'll uh a city I work for that I'll remain nameless.

We sold a piece of property for a million dollars and use that in our general fund as a revenue to pay for ongoing things.

What's the problem with that?

What do I do next year?

I can't if I hired people with that money, I can't, and I guess I can.

Am I gonna lay them off?

Or I have to have money, it's like I start that million dollars in the hole, if that makes sense.

But if you think about it, most of our capital projects funds are gonna budget a deficit.

They're gonna because we're saying we collected money this year, we're gonna use it the next year, and so our revenue source is savings, and that makes sense with capital projects.

Conservative estimates, I've always tried to do conservative estimates, and by that I just mean when I look at what I think we're gonna get in revenues.

I don't necessarily try to stretch it.

Now, every year you get into this budget thing and you're looking at trying to make things balance, and so sometimes, okay, I'm gonna budget 22 million dollars in sales tax revenues, and so then you get into things and it's like you know, could I budget 22 million two hundred thousand and still be reasonable?

There's not an exact formula that we need to follow.

There's a little bit of art to this, but by being conservative, that gives you a little margin for error.

You don't really know what's gonna happen, especially with sales taxes during the year.

You could have certain downturns or certain things happen, and if you've not been conservative, it can get you into trouble faster.

Uh same with expenditures.

We budget, we assume that our positions are gonna be filled all year long.

No, there's there's probably gonna be times when they're not filled.

Of course, you have the they have the opposite too.

You have somebody who retires that's been here for 20 years, and you have a vacation payout, that's money you weren't necessarily planning.

Usually they kind of balance out.

Um so now by nature, could having conservative estimates is gonna lead to a little bit of a surplus at the end of the year, usually.

One-time funds, I talked about being careful with one-time funds, quarterly reports.

Um, I have one today.

We maybe we won't get to this till next week, or maybe we get to it at a council.

But there's a quarterly report I've been preparing that I get to the elected officials every quarter.

Um I never really know what to put in there.

I try to put it in a somewhat format that is fine, like our financial statements, but I don't want to put in, I don't want it to be 140 pages either.

So look at that.

And if you have input on things that would like something different.

Pardon me, I'm trying to think of what I would like to see if I was in your seat, and I don't always know.

So but we'll look at some examples of that.

And I would I'll show you this when we get to it.

But the first quarter report is always not that useful because a lot of things haven't happened, there's a lot of expenditures that haven't happened.

We don't get property tax, like so our sales tax, the sales that occur in July are collected by the vendor in July.

They're paid to the tax commission in August, and then they're paid to the city in September.

So when I give you a report as of September 30th, I don't have hardly any property tax because it's all paid in uh December, and I've only got one month of sales tax, and so you look at it, and it does there's just not a lot of good data there.

And so you look at it, and it does there's just not a lot of good data there.

So I always on the first one.

I don't know.

I don't think it's not that useful, but sometimes it feels not that I have a suggestion.