The Bleg: I’m Looking for Help: Budget Folks, Software Folks, and Those That Do Both.
- That have been part of the Budget process at the NH Town, School Board, et al, especially if you are from an SB2 town/school district
- Code pounders
And great if you are in that intersection of the two!
The Background:
From my three terms on our BudComm, there are three tools I’ve wanted to write:
- Budget Tracker – take this year’s budget, put it into a normalized form (because the GL accounts keep getting moved around), and issue alerts when, on a rule basis, a GL account needs to be reviewed)
- School Utilization – teachers and facilities. We all know that enrollments are going down. We all know that the NH Dept of Ed has its own guidelines of teacher/student ratios. I know that much of the expense in MY town is the de facto lessening of that ratio (e.g., if the NHDOE is 1 teacher to 20 students, our’s is 1 to 10). Now throw in the para-educators. Now throw in the overhead folks like Superintendents, department heads, IT, et al that are not “Direct Labor”. Compare to other districts that are comparable.
- Year to Year Analysis – are budgets, line items, functional spending going up or down? Biggest problem – transfers to other line items, creation of new lines, deletions of others. Be able to flip infographics from yearly line item emphasis to functional (e.g., phone usage across buildings/departments when built on different GL accounts) to really see how Budgets are going up (or down – it does happen from time to time).
MY Problem:
For four years I’ve wanted to write this stuff but can’t seem to get the time to back away from GraniteGrok long enough to write it (along with a few other projects that would be helpful in the political domain). So, Grokster Jim (who just got elected to the NH House as well! Woo-Hoo!) suggested that I see if there are some folks that would be willing to help out instead of keeping all on my own shoulders to do. I’ve done most of the architectures in my head along with a lot of the functional blocks but no further (e.g., no fingers to keyboard). So, I’m finally asking for help.
Humbly. Hate to admit but I haven’t been able to do it all by myself.
So, if you have any interest on any kind of basis (slight to “LET’S ROLL NOW!), let me know. Email me at Skip@GraniteGrok.com or let me know in the comments.
If there is interest, I’d like to target sometime after the first of the year for some kind of meeting.
Thanks!
