Auburn Hills, Mich. – Jan. 22, 2018 – Munetrix, a public sector solutions provider offering data management, analytics and reporting tools for state and local governments and public school districts, continued to help local governments evaluate their fiscal climate and add to their coffers through a tool available on the expanded Munetrix platform. The Munetrix® Transparency Compliance Report WizardTM simplified the submission process for local governments applying to City, Village and Township Revenue Sharing (CVTRS) and County Incentive Program (CIP)—programs that distribute sales tax collected by the State of Michigan to local governments as unrestricted revenues.
Munetrix clients who used The Munetrix® Transparency Compliance Report Wizard™ are projected to receive state appropriations totaling more than $35 million in fiscal year 2018; since the tool’s inception in 2011, the State of Michigan has disbursed almost $200 million to Munetrix clients. One Oakland County township who used the report wizard, for example, will receive $319,030 in revenue sharing for fiscal 2018.
Munetrix President Bob Kittle said the reports required by the state could take weeks for those who do not use a transparency platform like Munetrix because they have to rely on a variety of time consuming, error-prone spreadsheets which end up as impractical PDFs. Instead, Kittle finds that local governments can complete the necessary paperwork in a couple of hours by using Munetrix tools. The key to capturing available revenue through the report wizard tool is the streamlined reporting process and the ability of users to gather additional information that has useful downstream benefits.
“The best part in using the Munetrix financial transparency and budget planning tools is that it is not futile work,” Kittle said. “The Munetrix® Transparency Compliance Report WizardTM abridges the total process to apply for statutory state revenue sharing under Michigan’s transparency requirements, so our local governments expend a fraction of the time compared to what they would have if they did this manually. Even better, the data is turned into useful information that helps them with business management and planning decisions going forward. This is just one of the many benefits of the system.”
The transparency platform is one of the reasons why Munetrix has landed on Government Technology Magazine’s Top 100 Companies 2018—the third consecutive year Munetrix has been recognized for making an impact in state and local government markets.
“Finance directors and chief administrators like the ease and cost savings associated with using Munetrix to complete their compliance reports,” Kittle said. “The Munetrix transparency platform has multiple uses. These reports are just an example of how an integrated system works to soften the impact of non-funded state-mandated reporting, while freeing up time for governmental units to focus on the efficient delivery of valuable services to their residents.”
The deadline to submit the required applications to the state in order to receive 100 percent of the state allotted revenue sharing for fiscal year 2018 was December 1, 2017. To receive pro-rated reduced payments, the application deadlines are February 1, April 1, June 1 and August 1, 2018, respectively.
