Sacramento County has an open RFP for an off-the-shelf budget system. The Office of Budget and Debt Management is looking for the software, implementation, project management and application management associated with the budget system.
The off-the-shelf solution will replace the county’s current system, which was developed in-house around 20 years ago, County CIO Rami Zakaria said.
”One of the biggest things that we do is our county financials, human resources and payroll,” Zakaria said of the Sacramento County Budget Development Application, for which he was lead analyst two decades ago.
The county has about 12,000 full-time employees and a budget of about $4 billion.
“It’s a financial system but it really deals with future things. It looks at past expenditures and it helps the department and the county executive, our CFO, in determining what the budget should be scheduled as in the next fiscal year and how it is appropriated,” Zakaria said.
The system should integrate with the county’s financial and human resources systems to provide some forecasting and trend information.
“We have that today but we are looking at something more advanced, more evolutionary,” Zakaria.
Zakaria anticipates some configuration of the solution to fit the accounting structure and other needs of the county.
“All the big systems out there are configurable these days. They understand that every entity has its own rules, and they accommodate that,” Zakaria said. “I do expect that we would do configuration, but we would not do any programmatic changes to the foundation of the system.”
The RFP closes Sept. 8, and Zakaria hopes the new system will last between 10 and 15 years.
