Financial Planning and Analysis System

The Vendor is required to provide information and feedback from interested parties in the industry regarding a Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) System.
- The City manages multiple Capital budgets, Operating budgets, Reserve Funds and Personnel budgeting through a combination of systems, tools, and manual processes. 
- The current environment relies heavily on spreadsheet-based processes with operating budgeting tracked within a rigid system lacking workflows and nearing end of life. 
- Additionally, there is manual reconciliations, and parallel tracking mechanisms, resulting in limited transparency, version control challenges, and delayed consolidation of enterprise financial information.
- This has resulted in fragmented financial information, limited enterprise wide visibility, and challenges in performing integrated planning, forecasting, and analysis across the organization.
- As the City’s financial planning needs continue to grow in scale and complexity, there is a need to better understand how modern Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) solutions can support more efficient, consistent, and transparent financial planning and budgeting practices.
- Improve Financial Planning Efficiency
•    Support more efficient and consistent financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting practices across the City by reducing reliance on manual effort and disconnected workflows.
- Enhance Visibility and Decision Making
•    Enable improved access to timely, accurate, and consolidated financial information to support transparency, accountability, and informed decision making across the organization.
- Support Integrated Budget Management
•    Support coordinated management of Capital, Operating, and Personnel budgets within a unified planning framework.
- Promote Consistency and Standardization
•    Enable standardized financial planning processes, reporting structures, and data definitions while accommodating diverse departmental needs, and potentially allowing for reporting to identify deviations or exceptions.
- Scenario Planning for Budget Process
•    The ability to support dynamic scenario planning that allows users to model multiple budget assumptions, adjust key drivers, and instantly view financial impacts across the organization. This would also enable side‑by‑side comparison of scenarios and seamless integration of selected scenarios into the formal budgeting process.
- Personnel Budgeting
•    Support multi‑year personnel budgeting, including configurable factors across future budget years.
•    Accommodate multiple compensation structures, including collective agreements and other pay escalation rules.
•    Manage the full position lifecycle, including existing positions, new positions, and in‑year changes.
•    Enable budget rollover from one fiscal year to future budget years.
•    Support budgeting at both individual position and/or individual employee levels.
•    Manage multiple and configurable employment types, including Full‑Time, Part‑Time, Contract,, and a mix of hourly and salaried employees.
•    Support shift‑based and variable staffing models, including 24/7 operations and standard business hours.
•    Provide configurable salary calculation methods.
•    Calculate, and budget, statutory and employer‑provided benefits.
- Operating Budgeting
•    Support configurable intake aligned with organizational and financial processes.
•    Capture comments and explanatory notes at the line-item level.
•    Potential, at the line-item level, to link to predetermined templates to indicate formulation.
•    Maintain alignment with active and inactive accounts and organizational units.
•    Support linkages between personnel and operating budgets.
•    Enable flexible analysis and review, including sorting, grouping, filtering, and comparison views.
•    Support multi-year operating budget planning, including long-term planning horizons (master plan, budget planning, long term financial planning, etc.).
•    Capture supporting detail, such as explanatory information or file attachments, that roll up to summarized accounts.
•    Support budget versioning and comparison during planning and review cycles.
•    Enable appropriate review and approval workflows.
•    Provide operating budget summaries and rollups for management review.
•    Allow for standard and ad-hoc reporting capabilities.
•    Ability to capture standardized assumptions that can be applied globally to selected accounts (e.g. inflation).
•    Ability to store standard metrics that can be used as drivers for different lines of business (e.g. population growth, asset inventory growth by type).
•    Ability to create templates for revenues or expenditures based on a pick list.
•    Ability to track expenditures or revenues and associated reserve funds.
- Capital Budgeting
•    Support configurable capital budget planning and data entry by project, program, and/or financial account.
•    Enable configurable capital grouping structures, such as asset classes, programs, or portfolio categories.
•    Capture project level descriptive information and commentary.
•    Manage capital project lifecycle status, including active and inactive projects with defined start and end dates.
•    Support modeling of operating impacts arising from capital investments, including lifecycle operating costs, staffing implications, and affordability analysis across multi-year planning.
•    Support both single-year and multi-year capital projects, including phased funding.
•    Enable long-term capital financial planning, including extended planning horizons.
•    Support capital budget rollups and summaries across organizational and project hierarchies.
•    Maintain visibility across past, current, and future capital budget years.
•    Support capital budget review and approval workflows.
•    Provide capital budget outputs suitable for internal management and external reporting purposes.
- Fund Management
•    Support budgeting and planning by funding source across operating, and capital budgets.
•    Allow the City to manage different funds, each with its own rules
•    Show how much money is available, planned, and remaining in each fund over time.
•    Ensure budgets do not exceed available funding.
•    Provide clear summaries and details by fund for review and reporting.
- Grant Management
•    Support planning and tracking of grant‑funded programs and projects.
•    Identify which costs are funded by grants and which are not.
•    Track grant amounts, spending limits, timelines, and expiry dates.
•    Show how much grant funding has been used and how much remains.
- Reserve Management
•    Provide multi‑year views of reserve balances to support long‑term planning.
•    Maintain visibility of past, current, and future reserve activity.
- Governance and Control
•    Support controlled publication of approved budget versions to SAP.
•    Support configurable gating mechanisms between approval and release.