The Polk County Board entered into an agreement for consulting services with Abdo, Eick & Meyer for consulting on financial systems earlier this month. They officially amended the 2019 budget to show that $135,000 contract this week said Polk County Commissioner Chuck Whiting. “Last meeting the County Board agreed to a consultant fee of about $135,000 to guide us in transitioning our finance software and a couple of related process things we do, how we do purchases and so forth,” said Whiting. “We decided to do that in January after the budget was set, so it wasn’t specifically budgeted for. We’ll offset it by holding off on a few expenses that were budgeted. We asked the board to formally amend the 2019 budget to recognize that contract and have a placeholder to charge back the expenses as they occur.”
One of the areas Whiting was hoping to hold off on for the current fiscal year was the purchase of a server for the current financial software. However, with the maintenance contract on the current server expiring, the County will have to purchase a replacement. “One of the things we’ll be looking at over the next year, year and a half is whether to switch the type of accounting software we have,” said Whiting. “The software we currently have has to reside on an IBM based server. The maintenance on that server expires right about now. We have to buy new hardware and enter into that maintenance agreement. Obviously, that’s happening maybe 8-12 months earlier then we’d like it as if we end up changing we might not need it. We have followed up with the vendor on what the hardware’s value is a year from now to repurpose or sell it. Or even use it as a revenue source when we partner with some other counties on some joint IT software and data housing. We had money budgeted for it, was one of the things I was hoping we wouldn’t have to commit to, but we do have to commit to it.”
The board also reviewed the 2018 final cash balances which showed the County was in good health fiscally. “We reviewed our cash balances by department and by fund for 2018,” said Whiting. “We haven’t done the audit for 2018 but the numbers look pretty good. A couple of variations from perhaps what we had budgeted in 2017 when we put the 2018 budget together and reviewed those with the board. Fiscally we are in good health and Polk County has always been pretty good with fund balances without being excessive withholding taxpayer dollars. No action was taken but in general, the budget for ’18 ended up looking pretty good.”
