Pinal County, Arizona
Mike McCord is the County Treasurer, and Kelli Munroe the Chief Deputy Treasurer for Pinal County, Arizona. The county is located between the two largest economic centers in Arizona: Phoenix and Tucson. Like many cities and counties across the country, Pinal County has seen tremendous growth in recent years. With nearly 500,000 residents now calling Arizona’s third largest county home, Mike and Kelli knew some things needed to change.
With accelerated economic growth and a county investment pool quickly approaching one billion in assets, their current investment management process simply couldn’t keep up. They needed a platform that could handle the complexities of changing cash flow needs and increased investment activity.
“It was time to streamline into one software instead of using a lot of spreadsheets and manual reporting tools,” Kelli says. “The multiple spreadsheets we used were located on a network drive that could potentially be compromised by someone accidentally changing or deleting something. In addition, you could only have one person using the spreadsheets at a time and would have to wait for that person to finish. It was inefficient, time-consuming, and definitely not a sustainable solution for us.”
Ultimately, Mike and Kelli knew they needed a better process to handle the increased sophistication and reporting demands larger public investment pools face. When they were shopping for a new system, Mike says “it was pretty apparent right from the start what MaxQ could do for us as far as time savings and efficiencies. The reporting impressed me and that, I think, was the difference.”
Once they settled on MaxQ, they needed to transition quickly. Kelli says the MaxQ system went from procurement to being fully on board in three months. “There really wasn’t much to compare it to. We were rolling!” Within six months she says, “we were no longer using any of the old spreadsheets.”
Mike says he appreciates how the MaxQ platform has an integrated, time-saving design that means even as the county continues to grow, they “don’t have to jump through multiple spreadsheets to make decisions” and provides “a single location we can access to download the necessary information.”
Every month, the county staff provides a report to their Board of Supervisors on the state of the portfolio and investments that they hold. Kelli says “it’s easy to print or export the desired information from MaxQ. That’s significant in creating efficiency and time savings for our staff.”
The other value is what it provides for the public. “I think it makes us more effective at our job,” Kelli says. “When Mike goes to our constituents, he can have real numbers we pull that day for him to expound on. That means our taxpayers know exactly where our money is at and how it is being invested any time they ask.”
Mike agrees. “We are bringing in a larger volume of money in a shorter period of time. Before it would take a couple of months to get through all the tax bills, and now it just takes days. That money is now hitting our bank accounts faster and MaxQ gives us the ability to invest and make decisions at a faster rate than ever before. I would say it pulled us out of the stone age and into the 21st century.”