Members of the Syracuse City Council Finance Committee, joined by Councillors Hudson and Caldwell, held a budget hearing for the Financial Operations division. Director Anne Marie Deegan provided an overview of the division's responsibilities, workload, and strategic initiatives for the upcoming fiscal year.
Let's do it. All right. Good afternoon. Good morning, everyone. That's still morning. We are moving to part three of the finance department. We're going to be discussing the financial operations. We are joined by Councillor Hudson and Councillor Caldwell. I forgot to recognize you earlier. Thank you for coming. And joining us at the table is Anne Marie Deegan. And so we're page 93 for financial operations. And where you've been here for the last couple. If you want to give a an overview of how everything all fits together, and then you two are down a little bit year over year in your budget. And so if I had to guess uh the same trend will follow that we'll have more of a conversation around operations rather than numbers. Right. Sounds good. Thank you for taking the time. Financial operations kind of does a bunch of different things. So the main our main areas of focus are payroll, um requisitions and vouchers, so that's getting purchase orders and payments in and out for the city, as well as uh special projects. So we are involved as you all know with payroll project. We also are involved with the center of excellence for the grants, um, and so we have those three areas that we focus on. Um I did print out a couple numbers that you guys might be interested in. Uh we last year, last fiscal year, we processed just over or just under 25,000 uh voucher payments. We um entered approximately 4,000 requisitions, so that's a purchase order. So purchase orders are created, multiple payments can hit those at some time, so that's why there's a disparity in in that, as well as the team that is actually cutting the checks and ACH payments. That is about 18,000. So those are kind of some of the numbers for the one part of my team. Um payroll, obviously, is working hard every day to make sure that everybody gets paid, and that is that is still going forward. They're still doing that in the midst of also just starting our new payroll project with our new consultants that's just getting underway, and then the financial um or that excuse me, the center of excellence for grants is a process we're just kind of well, not just we've been working on for about a year, and we are now have some other supports in place. So uh along with uh the mayor's office and research and all the departments that function in the grants world, we're getting together and trying to find efficiencies around how those are processed, how we get refunds and reimbursements and that sort of thing. Just kind of jumping into numbers a little bit. You had a little bit of an overrun in salary for the current year projected, but then it's back down again for next year. So that is uh doing part for two things. One, we have uh people being paid out of title, and that adjustment happens because they're you know we're trying to get people in the right position. Um, and so that's that's the main reason why that's uh different, and then um we've kind of restructured how our workforce functions. So that'll be the other part of the reduction for the future next year. You're one overall reduction in position. Are you going to be impacted by that reduction? We should not be. Okay. What do you do well? What do you need to be doing better in terms of resources? Right? In terms of resource-wise. Um, I think that what we do well, we we get payments out the door every week, whether it's to our vendors or to our staff. Um we work hard to make sure that that happens in a timely fashion. Um there are some projects that I have on my list of things to do to make those processes easier on the on the vendor side. Um, and hopefully this next year I'll be able to move forward with that. Part of that is taking out uh right now we use help desk to help manage our workflow.