Client Background

The Industrial Commission of Arizona (ICA) is a State of Arizona government agency responsible for administering and overseeing key programs that support Arizona’s workforce and employers. As part of its operations, ICA manages and allocates public funding across multiple programs and projects, ensuring resources are properly planned, tracked, and reported. A significant portion of ICA’s budgeting involves staffing and payroll-related costs, where funding must be distributed across initiatives and reported to different stakeholders often under both state and federal reporting requirements.

The Challenge

ICA needed to produce a lot of different reports, but the process was highly manual and time-consuming:

• Budgets and allocations were maintained across many Excel files.
• Teams manually allocated funds across projects and salaries, then manually assembled each report in the required format.
• Reporting had an added complexity: state and federal “offset” years, which made it difficult to reconcile timelines and ensure consistent results across reports.
• Payroll-related budgeting also required accurate calculation of salaries and related employee taxes, deductions, insurance, pension contributions, and other add-ons), which increased the risk of errors.

Solution

We implemented an automated budgeting and reporting framework designed around ICA’s real-world reporting structure and rules:

• Built functionality to allocate funds accurately across projects and salary categories.
• Implemented automated calculation of salaries and related taxes and charges to ensure the consistent treatment of payroll expenses across reporting.
• Designed and delivered thirteen custom reports, each matching ICA’s established formats, including both federal reports showing how funds are spent and state-calendar reports showing program execution.

Results

• All data in one centralized place: ICA moved from scattered files to a single, centralized source of truth for budgeting, allocations, employee related calculations, and reporting.
• No more complex Excel maintenance: ICA eliminated the need to manage multi-file, multi-tab spreadsheets and a tedious manual consolidation/reconciliation process.
• End-to-end Automated business process: Allocations, employee related calculations, and the generation of thirteen report formats went from a manual effort to a repeatable, automated workflow.
• Reporting time cut from weeks to minutes: What used to take weeks of manual preparation and checks was reduced to minutes, while keeping the exact report formats ICA and stakeholders were used to (while accounting for offset state vs federal fiscal years).