Case Study: City of Rochester achieves streamlined CAFR reporting, improved accuracy and substantial time savings with Workiva's Wdesk

Workiva Helps City of Rochester Streamline Comprehensive Annual Financial Reporting Process

Workiva partnered with the City of Rochester, N.Y., to tackle the city’s cumbersome Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) process, which required consolidating 80–100 documents from nearly 10 departments. Previously the team built narratives separately from spreadsheets, manually reconciled rounding and totals, and faced time-consuming, error-prone work while needing to keep existing legacy systems intact.

By implementing Wdesk, Rochester moved to a single, linked document that ties narrative, numbers and supporting reports so changes update everywhere automatically and integrates with legacy systems. The city reported substantial time savings—especially in preparing financial statements—improved accuracy and consistency across statements, and better collaboration across junior and seasoned staff.

City of Rochester

Rosiland Brooks-Harris

Deputy Director of Finance