Last council meeting I asked about the way the financial report in the weekly report tracked the costs of the Music Center.  What prompted this question was that I heard other council members say we've had more than $1 million dollars in ticket sales yet the weekly report showed receipts of only $437,674.55.

Currently both the Music Center and Aquatic Center are managed by contractors so the day to day finances are not reflected in the weekly report.  I'm sure I didn't like this aspect of the Aquatic Center contract and proposed language that would require reports on weekly receipts.  If that had been done then the city report could show this.  For the Music Center we knew we wouldn't get weekly reports because we were told that we had to keep how much we paid each individual act confidential.    Instead of the report we get currently, shown here:



I believe it is more appropriate to include the budgeted amount into the Encumbrances column.  For instance, if we have approved a budget of $2.5 million dollars for the music center our financial reports should add that $2.5 million to the encumbered amount until the contractor turns over the numbers from their books.  

In a standard arrangement if the city signed a contract with an act that called for us to pay that act $100,000 then the city would track that obligation to pay as encumbered money.   Once the act was paid then the money would no longer be encumbered it would be tracked in the expenses column.   Since we don't want to reveal how much we are paying each act we let the contractor track this information on their own books.  This is fine except we can't see how much we are "on the hook for" and at the end of the year council may be surprised by a huge bill.  

A better way to track it in our records would be to consider the budget council passed and that the contractor must stay under as an obligation that we are on the hook for, i.e. as one large encumbrance until the contractor came back to us with specific numbers.