The Speed We Need

Many local governments struggle to complete their annual comprehensive financial report (ACFR) on time and with an acceptable amount of effort. This paper shows how local governments can complete their ACFR faster and with the same or even less effort. Our goal is to help public finance professionals avoid burnout while pursuing the profession’s goals of rapid, high-quality financial reporting — and perhaps free up time to focus on the many other tasks vying for their attention outside of financial reporting.

How will we achieve this ambitious goal? By thinking of ACFR production as a process. By doing so, we can take advantage of timeless principles for process efficiency. These methods have been widely used in the private and public sectors for many years but, to our knowledge, have rarely been applied to local government financial reporting.

• Publication date: June 2025
• Authors: Shayne Kavanagh and Todd Buikema, CPA