You serve as the Deputy Chief Financial Officer of your city government. Recent
discussions in upper-level management meetings highlight concerns about the
government’s financial performance. Juliet Sweeting, the city’s Chief Financial
Officer (CFO) asked you to help benchmark your city’s financial performance against
another city of similar size. You have been tasked to create a Dashboard in Excel
that can use to compare your city to any other city. The comparison will be done with
ratios commonly used to evaluate the financial health of city governments.
Your goal is to choose another city similar to yours and compute the ratios for each
city. Create a dashboard whereby Ms. Sweeting, CFO can easily read and
understand the results in 30 seconds or less.
- Find the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports for two cities.
- Type in the financial statements of the two cities in side-by-side fashion on Tab 3
of your Excel file (Do not copy and paste a picture. You need these numbers for
your computations). If data not shown on the financial statements is necessary
for your ratio computations, create an “Other Information” area to post this data
for the two cities.
- Use Tab 2 of your Excel file to show the computation of the ratios by category; see the Appendix below. The information used to compute the ratios should flow
from the data in Tab 3. Make sure it is clear to your CFO that you know how to
compute and interpret these ratios.
- Use Tab 1 to create a dashboard showing the results of the ratios, comparing
the two cities. The dashboard should be composed ONLY of clearly-marked
graphs that convey the data in a way that makes it easy to read and understand
quickly.
- When Ms. Juliet Sweeting, CFO changes numbers on the financial statements
on Tab 3, the dashboard graphs should automatically change.
