The Background
Goodyear, Arizona is a culturally and educationally diverse city of 106,000 residents located in Maricopa County just outside of Phoenix. With palm-lined streets and beautiful mountain views, Goodyear has been ranked one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. 1
Goodyear’s Finance Manager, Celina Morris, and her team were looking for a better way to manage the City’s $456,461,362 in outstanding debt.2 They required a software solution to help them eliminate spreadsheets, reduce manual inputs, and streamline reporting.
What’s more, with the then-upcoming implementation of the GASB 87 accounting standard, the City needed a solution to help manage their lease agreements and simplify compliance with the new standard.
The Challenge
Before the City of Goodyear began using DebtBook for both debt and lease management, the team was bogged down in paperwork; there were multiple versions of spreadsheets for debt schedules, debt payments, budgeting, and more. As a result, reconciling spreadsheets involved tedious manual processes that were time-consuming, prone to error, and inefficient.
For example, when the City did a refunding, the information wasn’t automatically updated across various divisions’ records. This led to budgeting discrepancies, which required a trip to the council in order to make budget amendments.
Another pain point arose when it came time to do Continuing Disclosure — locating all the required documents within Goodyear’s division network proved to be a challenge.
According to Celina Morris, “There were so many different spreadsheets our internal and external teams were working in that we’d have to go back to do reconciliations, and no one likes that. So ensuring we had one version of the truth was important to us. We needed a way to gather and share documentation and that’s where DebtBook came in.”
The Solution
The Goodyear team discovered DebtBook’s solution when a colleague raved about how it made their financial statement disclosures easier. The team scheduled a demo and was delighted to learn that DebtBook could not only efficiently organize and manage the City’s debt, but that the platform could facilitate the GASB 87 compliance process — a huge plus for them.
The team was also familiar with competing platforms and knew there wasn’t anything comparable to DebtBook’s functionality; being able to slice and dice financial information for reporting purposes, along with a GASB 87 product built by CPAs was just what they had been looking for. Once they’d done their due diligence and consulted with references, the Goodyear team chose DebtBook as their provider of choice to help transform the way they work.
From a procurement standpoint, the City of Goodyear was able to avoid a long and onerous RFP process by utilizing an NCPA contract to onboard DebtBook. DebtBook also provided extensive training and assistance to the Goodyear team so they could utilize the platform quickly.
The implementation process was great. We had high expectations that as a partner with DebtBook we’d be treated as an only client, and DebtBook did not disappoint. We had a team of great implementers who guided us through the process. DebtBook’s Premium Implementation couldn’t have been any easier for us. The hardest part was gathering all of our documents and the DebtBook team did the rest.”
— Celina Morris, Finance Manager
The Impact
With DebtBook, the City of Goodyear found a better way to manage debt and leases among multiple internal and external teams. The platform eliminated the need for document requests and drawn out exchanges over email, allowing everyone to access the information on demand.
A true management and compliance tool, DebtBook made it easier for all stakeholders — from the Trustees to the Executive Team to Budget and Compliance groups— to access reports and documents all in one place.
By partnering with DebtBook, the City of Goodyear transformed multiple financial information silos into a single source of truth, helping it standardize financial data, improve compliance, and streamline financial processes.
1 US Census Bureau via the City of Goodyear website goodyearaz.gov/our-city
2 As of June 30, 2022
