Case Study: Large Western City achieves faster, more accurate CAFR reporting with Workiva Wdesk

Large western city upgrades CAFR process with Wdesk

A large metropolitan city in the western United States—where the controller had produced the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for more than 17 years—faced a cumbersome, error-prone process. A three-person financial reporting team relied on Word and Excel to assemble 200‑page reports with 100+ schedules, dealing with unstable links, manual data entry, frequent adjustments, recent retirements that left the group short‑staffed, and a prior reporting solution that proved inflexible.

The city replaced its legacy process with Workiva’s Wdesk, with hands‑on support from a Customer Success Manager, linking source data (including Cognos extracts) directly into templates, enabling real‑time collaboration and automatic updates. The change cut some reporting steps from weeks to days, reduced quarterly assembly time from nearly two weeks to a couple of days, delighted auditors, freed staff for value‑added review work, and saved labor costs equivalent to about six months of a full‑time salary.