These problems come from the realities public finance professionals are facing, informed by practitioner input, GFOA research, and other public finance signals. Read together, they point to less fiscal room, fewer people, and greater technological complexity. GovFi looks for practical solutions to these problems, whether we build them, partner with others, or invest behind them.
63%
cite funding and revenue pressure
41%
cite technology and cybersecurity
32%
cite staffing and pipeline as a threat to the profession
Revenue growth is lagging expenditure growth, and traditional revenue portfolios were built for an economy that no longer exists. Finance officers can see the gap widening without a clear path to restructuring.
Signal: GFOA describes government revenue portfolios as in flux, and names affordability, capital needs, inflation, and revenue uncertainty as active pressures.
What a solution needs to do
Model revenue structure against the actual local economic base
Make trade-offs legible to elected officials
Account for affordability and equity, not just yield
Multi-year financial plans are widely recognized as good practice but often skipped because maintaining one under volatile conditions exceeds available capacity. Capital commitments, future operating costs, and strategic priorities can remain disconnected from the financial outlook.
Signal: GFOA addresses multi-year planning under sustained budgetary headwinds. Practitioner interviews identified forecasting uncertainty and the need to link multi-year and capital plans with strategy and performance.
What a solution needs to do
Cut the effort of building and maintaining a plan
Handle scenarios rather than single-point forecasts, with inspectable assumptions
Connect capital commitments to future operating and maintenance costs
Make implications for strategic priorities and service levels visible in output a council can act on
Vacancy and turnover savings, idle balances, and unspent appropriations can leave money available for other priorities. Finance staff struggle to connect budget, staffing, payroll, ledger, and cash information to see what is available, when it can be used, and which restrictions apply.
Signal: Practitioner interviews identified vacancy savings, idle fund balances, and near-term cash visibility as opportunities to improve resource decisions.
What a solution needs to do
Identify potentially available resources across budget, staffing, payroll, and ledger data
Distinguish temporary savings from recurring capacity, and unrestricted resources from restricted or committed amounts
Show timing and cash implications, with assumptions finance staff can inspect
Support deliberate redeployment without treating every unspent dollar as available
Vacancies and repetitive work are slowing reporting
Persistent staffing shortages collide with rising service expectations. Short-handed teams repeatedly rebuild close schedules, budget books, and recurring reports, delaying delivery and leaving less time for analysis.
Signal: GFOA identifies staffing and pipeline as a leading threat to the profession. Practitioner interviews also identified repeated template preparation and the need for reusable, state-specific reporting tools.
What a solution needs to do
Reduce routine preparation work rather than redistribute it
Reuse templates that reflect applicable state and local reporting requirements
Produce editable outputs in formats staff already use, with traceable source data and review steps
Be usable by a short-handed team and show value without a long implementation
Retirements and turnover take undocumented process knowledge with them. The next person inherits tasks without the reasoning behind them, and improvements can disappear when the person who championed them leaves.
Signal: GFOA cites retirements and succession alongside talent shortages. Practitioner interviews also described innovations that did not survive the departure of their champion.
What a solution needs to do
Capture process knowledge as a byproduct of work, not a separate project
Make instructions and the reasoning behind them retrievable when a question arises
Make process ownership, handoffs, and maintenance responsibilities explicit
Support incorporation of improvements into standard procedures and ongoing work
Specialized expertise smaller governments cannot hire
Debt, treasury, actuarial, technology, and specialized risk-finance expertise can be unaffordable at small-government scale. Staff must navigate unfamiliar questions, including self-insurance, internal service funds, and incentive agreements, without sufficient expert support.
Signal: GFOA explores alternative staffing models to address expertise shortages. Practitioner interviews also identified gaps in specialized risk-finance guidance.
What a solution needs to do
Provide reliable guidance or expert support without requiring a specialist hire
Scale down to governments with a handful of finance staff
Make assumptions, sources, and limits clear, including when specialist review is needed
ERP, AI, data quality, automation, implementation risk.
Technology TransformationIn build
Trusted answers to public finance questions
Public finance questions have specific, correct answers grounded in standards and practice. General-purpose AI does not know them and will confidently invent them.
Signal: Technology, AI, and ERP complexity ties for the top professional challenge at 32%.
What a solution needs to do
Ground answers in authoritative public finance sources
Finance officers are being sold AI constantly and lack a reliable way to evaluate which claims hold up in government finance workflows. They also need a safe, manageable way to experiment before committing to adoption.
Signal: GFOA has published on balancing AI innovation against risk. Practitioner interviews identified both difficulty separating value from hype and barriers to adopting AI safely.
What a solution needs to do
Provide a structured way to evaluate claims before procurement
Support safe experimentation with clear rules for data use, retention, and access
Account for accuracy, security, ethics, and public trust alongside efficiency
Provide evidence a CFO can use to assess value and explain an adoption decision
Financial information is trapped in ERP and legacy systems or scattered across spreadsheets. Routine questions require manual exports, reconciliation, IT assistance, or vendor support, leaving staff without a timely, trusted view of operations.
Signal: Practitioner interviews identified difficult ERP reporting, disconnected data sources, and vendor dependence as barriers to analysis and automation.
What a solution needs to do
Make existing financial data usable across systems without requiring an ERP replacement
Provide reporting finance staff can use without repeated IT or vendor assistance
Reconcile outputs to source records and make definitions and transformations inspectable
Respect access controls and support export in reusable formats
Cyber, GASB, grants, federal mandates, reporting burden.
Risk & ComplianceOpen
Cyber-enabled fraud outpacing controls
Payment diversion and cyber-enabled fraud are evolving faster than the internal controls built to catch them, and losses run to millions.
Signal: Technology and cybersecurity is cited by 41%. GFOA published Cyber Risk Savvy 2.0 with the Center for Digital Government and maintains a ransomware insurance model.
What a solution needs to do
Catch diversion attempts inside the payment workflow itself
Work without a dedicated security team
Help quantify residual risk for insurance decisions
Federal funding volatility and grant reimbursement backlogs
Changing grant rules and closeout requirements create unpredictable compliance work. Meanwhile, reimbursement claims can stall when spending, project records, and supporting documents sit in different departments or systems, delaying cash recovery and putting awards at risk.
Signal: GFOA identifies federal and state uncertainty as a significant concern. Practitioner interviews also identified reimbursement backlogs, difficult documentation handoffs, and deobligation risk.
What a solution needs to do
Track award obligations, deadlines, and rule changes
Show reimbursement aging and outstanding documentation by award and grantor
Reduce manual assembly of claims and closeout packages across departments and systems
Flag reimbursement, compliance, and deobligation exposure early
Data center development brings economic-development upside alongside power, water, and long-term capital demands that local capital plans were never sized for.
Signal: GFOA's Power Surge work on balancing incentives against infrastructure requirements.
What a solution needs to do
Model full infrastructure cost against projected revenue
Expose long-horizon obligations during negotiation, not after
Capital and utility decisions rest on asset condition data that is incomplete, out of date, or spread across disconnected systems. In some cases the needed data has never been collected, making capital estimates and funding decisions difficult to defend.
Signal: GFOA addresses asset management, capital planning, and utility funding. Practitioner interviews also identified missing condition inventories and weak capital estimates.
What a solution needs to do
Assemble a usable asset picture from imperfect sources and identify missing information
Support collection or validation of condition data where it does not exist
Show uncertainty in condition assessments and capital cost estimates
Tie condition and estimated needs to funding, maintenance, and rate decisions
Budgeting, procurement, payments, process redesign.
Operating EffectivenessOpen
Budgeting too incremental to respond
Traditional line-item budgeting carries last year forward, which makes it slow to reallocate when conditions change and hard to tie spending to results.
Signal: GFOA's Rethinking Budgeting initiative, including its program budgeting and program inventory work.
What a solution needs to do
Make program-level cost visible without a year-long conversion
Adopted budgets are legally complete but often difficult for councils and residents to understand. Finance staff struggle to explain spending choices, financial estimates, and uncertainty in terms that support informed discussion and public trust.
Signal: GFOA addresses modern budget and capital communication. Practitioner interviews also identified difficulties communicating financial choices and defensible estimates to governing boards.
What a solution needs to do
Translate budget information without creating a second version of the truth
Explain key assumptions, uncertainty, and trade-offs in plain language
Work for councils and residents alike and remain traceable to underlying financial information
Procurement delays and fragmented spending obscure costs
Buying is spread across departments, making it difficult to see opportunities to combine purchases or identify spending outside established purchasing processes. Procurement delays also tie up money and make planned spending and project delivery less predictable.
Signal: Practitioner interviews identified fragmented commodity spending, procurement bottlenecks, and the opportunity cost of money awaiting procurement.
What a solution needs to do
Identify comparable purchases across departments and opportunities to aggregate spending
Make procurement stages, delays, and realistic commitment timelines visible
Quantify financial and service consequences of delays, using inspectable assumptions
Work with existing purchasing records and flag gaps in coding or timestamps
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