Case Study: City of Lawrence, Kansas achieves time savings and streamlined budgeting with OpenGov

Lawrence, KS Builds Budget in OpenGov to Save Time and Streamline Process

Lawrence, Kansas — a vibrant university city with a $189M annual budget and about 95,000 residents — faced a shrinking finance team and a manually intensive budgeting process that relied on static spreadsheets. With limited staff and long nights reconciling numbers that didn’t roll up across reports, the Finance Department needed a faster, more transparent way to build and share the budget.

The city implemented OpenGov Budget Builder, a quick-to-deploy, user-friendly solution that automated rollups, enabled department-level edits, and produced visualizations and trend reports on demand. The result: significant staff time saved (returning nights and weekends), improved internal access and transparency, and freed the Finance Director to focus on strategic priorities like large bond issuances — plus ongoing ideas-sharing through the OpenGov Network.

City of Lawrence, Kansas

Bryan Kidney

Finance Director