Wright City has approved moving its accounting calendar to start in the summer in an effort to eliminate what city officials called the “crystal ball” element from their annual budgeting process.

The Wright City Board of Aldermen last week voted to change the city’s fiscal year to begin July 1 and end June 30, rather than following the calendar year as it has done previously.

“A couple of reasons for this,” Mayor Michelle Heiliger said at the Thursday, Oct. 22 meeting. “No. 1, we’ve already made this adjustment with our performance increases and personnel reviews. We have found that by doing that, it makes it easier to budget. We can see the impact that it has in the middle of the year rather than at the beginning of the year.”

The city receives the vast majority of its annual revenue in December and January, Heiliger said.

“So our auditor every year has to play the game of ‘What money goes in last year? What money goes in this year?’” she added. “And for us, from a budgeting perspective, it’s impossible to know what we have. So if we move our year to the middle of the year, all of our revenue is already there. We already know what we’re working with.”

While getting the budgeting process out of the holiday season is “a personal perk,” Heiliger told the aldermen, “the biggest piece is really knowing what our revenue is, because as you guys know, we play a crystal ball game of ‘What do we think we’re going to get?’ and ‘How much was last year? How much was this year?’ and this way we’ll be dealing with real dollars.”

Alderman Karey Owens echoed Heiliger’s comments, noting that the city is often playing a guessing game when it comes to making revenue projections.

“It is an art and a science and part crystal ball,” she said.

When the aldermen work on the city’s budget following the calendar year, Heiliger said, there are often many unknown factors to account for.

“We have no idea what our work comp increase is going to be, we have no idea what our property and liability increase is going to be, we don’t know what our health insurance increase is going to be, because all those things happen between October and January,” she said. “So, when we’re trying to budget, again, we’re guessing what we think they’re going to be, whereas if we do this in June, we know.”

Owens said she could recall a time within the last few years when a higher-than-expected increase in one of the city’s annual insurance contracts forced aldermen to significantly rework their budget plans.

Heiliger said the change to the new fiscal year will result in one shorter “fiscal year” period, from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2027.

“It will be a six-month fiscal year, which actually in this case is good for us, because we’ll have new accounting software, so we’ll be able to audit that first six months and make sure that the accounting software is working the way we expect. It will be a shorter period of time, less data to fiddle through,” she said, adding that the first full 12-month fiscal year on the new schedule would start July 1, 2027 and run through June 30, 2028.

“So we will have another audit right on top of this one, which isn’t a terrible thing,” she said.

Alderman Don Andrews asked for clarification on the timing of the audits and fiscal years. City Clerk Abbie Ogborn said the audit for the 2026 calendar year will begin in February 2027, the audit of the shorter January to June 2027 “fiscal year” will start in August 2027, and the audit of the first 12-month fiscal year on the new accounting calendar, from July 2027 to June 2028, will begin in August 2028.

Owens said she works for a school photo company that receives a large majority of its annual revenue in the fourth quarter and made a change to its accounting schedule for similar reasons. The city’s shift to a fiscal year starting in the summer similarly fits with “best practices,” she said, “to make sure that we’re making decisions with all the information.”

The board voted 3-0 to approve the fiscal year change. Alderman Kim Arbuthnot was absent.