Lisa Pederson has been the Finance Director of the City of Red Wing for nine years. For seven of them, the first two weeks of February were lost to reconciliation work — journal entries chased across four spreadsheets and one on-premise system that had been acquired, renamed, and patched three times since 1998.
In 2024, Red Wing migrated to Cirrus over a single weekend. Lisa's department kept the same four people. The work did not.
We spent most of February working on strategy, not chasing journal entries. For a four-person finance department, that shift is the whole ballgame. — Lisa Pederson, Finance Director, City of Red Wing, MN
The point of this story is not that software saves time. That is the promise every vendor makes. The point is what a finance director does with the time after the software keeps its promise — and who benefits. In Red Wing, the answer is a five-year capital plan that was written, for the first time in a decade, by the people who will have to execute it.
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