Statutory duty, and the cost of discharging it.

“We have a statutory duty and no line in the budget for discharging it.”

Public bodies cannot choose not to deliver. What they can choose is how, and the how is rarely examined across services — each one optimizing locally while the shared cost sits between them.

outturn
virement
statutory vs discretionary
unit cost
cost recovery
demand management
general fund

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in the public sector. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Unit cost of a service varying substantially between neighboring areas with similar demand, unexamined because the comparison is nobody's job.
Fees and charges set historically and never uprated to cost recovery, subsidizing users at the expense of the general fund.
Direct awards and off-framework procurement accumulating without aggregate visibility.
Property portfolio holding cost carried by services that do not see it and cannot act on it.
Demand management effort concentrated at the point of crisis rather than upstream, where it is cheaper.

Not every the public sector is the same business

CountiesHuman services, corrections and indigent health consuming most of the general fund, at a unit cost set in a market the county does not control.
Cities and municipalitiesA general fund small enough that a single solid waste, fleet or public safety contract is a material share of it.
Special districts and authoritiesWater, transit, port and utility districts with their own bond covenants and rate-setting, sitting outside the parent government's normal monitoring.
Public housing authoritiesHUD-funded operations carrying a capital needs assessment older than several of the assumptions built on it.
Police, fire and emergency servicesPosition-driven cost with overtime as the only flex, and mutual aid agreements whose cost shares were agreed once and never revisited.
Component units and shared servicesTrading with the parent government on a cost allocation nobody has rebuilt since the entity was created.

Where this data actually lives

Tyler Technologies (Munis / Enterprise ERP) or CentralSquare as the ledger; Oracle Fusion or Workday in the larger counties and cities
A separate case management system for human services — where most of the demand and most of the cost actually sit, and which rarely reconciles to the ledger
Accela or Tyler EnerGov for permitting, licensing and code enforcement, holding fee revenue nobody has re-costed against the effort to deliver it
A property tax and utility billing system owned by a different department from the one that answers for collection
A budget monitoring workbook per department that is the real working document between the ledger and the year-end actuals
Contract registers in three places — procurement, the attorney's office and the department — that do not agree with each other

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

actual against budget by fund and department
unit cost per case or per placement
cost recovery on fees and charges
fund balance as a share of expenditures
capital improvement plan slippage
overtime and temporary staffing spend
property tax collection rate
days to pay a vendor invoice

The obligations that set the deadlines

The Annual Comprehensive Financial Report under GASB, and an audit opinion that may or may not arrive before the next budget is adopted
The Single Audit under 2 CFR 200 where federal awards cross the threshold — findings here are public, and repeat findings are read as a management failure
The cost allocation plan and any negotiated indirect cost rate, which decide how much of your overhead a federal grant will actually carry
Grant agreements and their conditions, including clawback on unspent, late or ineligible expenditure
Continuing disclosure to EMMA under the bond covenants, including the fund balance and coverage ratios the covenants actually name
State-mandated budget and financial reports, filed by departments separately from the accounts they should agree with

What the review would ask you for

7 requests written for the public sector and asked of nobody else — 2 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

Budget against outturn by service Core With virements and their reasons.
Statutory versus discretionary spend Core By service area.
Fees, charges and income generation Cost recovery against the actual cost.
Procurement and framework use Compliant, framework and direct award, with justification.
Grant funding received and its conditions
Demand and caseload by service Volume, complexity and unit cost.
Property and asset portfolio Utilization and holding cost.

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A forecast overspend reported quarterly that grows at each report
A Single Audit finding, a material weakness, or a repeat finding from last year
A fund balance that has fallen through the reserve policy the covenants assume
A federal grant approaching its period of performance deadline with the money unspent
An ERP or case management replacement, which surfaces every local workaround
A bond rating review, or a shared services and cost allocation review where the basis is examined for the first time since it was set

Who this involves

Signs it: The finance director or CFO, with the city or county manager
Resists it: Department heads, whose unit costs become comparable with neighboring jurisdictions'
Has been asking for it: Budget analysts, who have been writing the exception reports

Who commissions it

Finance directors, city and county managers and chief executives. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with the public sector than the sector label suggests.