Case Study: City of Fort Wayne, Indiana achieves 75% faster budget book production with Workiva

Fort Wayne Cuts Financial Reporting Process by 75% with Workiva and F.H. Black & Company Incorporated

The City of Fort Wayne’s finance team, led by Finance Manager Kathleen Smith, struggled with a highly manual budget-book and ACFR process that required roughly 400 hours each cycle; changing a single number could add 30–45 minutes of work, introduced risk of errors, and made it difficult to provide managers the real-time budget feedback they needed.

With help from F.H. Black & Company and the Workiva cloud platform, the city automated data pulls from its ERP, linked values across documents, and enabled collaborative, permissioned editing so changes update everywhere at the source. The new process cut budget-book production time by about 75% (to ~100 hours), delivered the book a week earlier, and freed the team to focus on analysis and faster decision-making.

City of Fort Wayne, Indiana

Kathleen Smith

Finance Manager