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Finance Commission Minutes January 10, 2017 – Draft Minutes Page 3 of 6 Chair Schroeder asked if there was a way the Commission could get the detailed information 91 they need without it being costly or burdensome for staff. 92 93 Finance Director Miller stated all of the data that he uses is in an Excel format. 94 95 Commissioner Zeller stated the new version of Excel has a feature called Tree Mapping which 96 would be similar to Tableau. As an account, he would find it helpful to have a comprehensive 97 trial balance with account titles, balance, and credit or debit. 98 99 Commissioner Bachhuber stated a higher level of detail would be helpful for the Commission to 100 do their job and challenge assumptions in the budgeting process. 101 102 Chair Schroeder asked what it would take to get a summary trail balance for the Commission to 103 review. 104 105 Commissioner Zeller stated he would like to see this include a summary of each account in the 106 trial balance including the ending balance and credit or debit. 107 108 Finance Director Miller stated they do not produce this much detail for the auditors but this is 109 something that would be available internally. He could provide a summary for the Commission 110 on areas that they are interested in looking into. 111 112 Chair Schroeder stated this would be good information for the Commission to start with and they 113 can determine where to go from this point. 114 115 Finance Director Miller stated he would send out what the current program provides and the 116 Commission can look at the format and determine if this is something that would be useful to the 117 work they are doing. 118 119 120 Discussion on Establishing a Cash Reserve Fund 121 122 Chair Schroeder stated this was a concept she would like the Commission to consider. All of the 123 funds have a reserve amount that they need to have and this fluctuates for every fund from year 124 to year. This makes it difficult to determine if the overall reserve is up or down. If each 125 department or fund area put the reserve amount they need for the year in their budget documents. 126 This would be an additional line item and all of the over or under amounts would be calculated in 127 one fund. She clarified this would be for the unrestricted operating reserves. The amount in the 128 final account would be what is over or under each department reserve requirements. This would 129 make it easy to determine of the budget was over or under each year. This would provide a clear 130 picture of what the City’s total surplus or deficit was for the year. She suggested Commissioners 131 consider this and put together comments or questions for a future Commission discussion. 132 133 Commissioner Bachhuber asked how this would be different than the one spreadsheet the 134 Commission provided to the Council that combined all of the accounts. He also asked what the 135