BUDGET PROCESS:
 The most common and recognizable financial system is the budget process. The municipal budget is the means by which local officials and town meeting decide how and where available municipal funds shall be spent. In the most basic budget systems, forms requesting funds are completed annually by department heads and transmitted for review to the selectmen and finance committee. The finance committee must then report to the town meeting the committee’s recommended sums of money for each department’s appropriation. An appropriation is the town’s legally allocated sum of money for a given department, or for the municipality as a whole. Appropriations are determined annually for the following fiscal year, which is the 12-month period for which revenues are collected and spent for public purposes. In Massachusetts, the fiscal year runs from July 1 through the following June 30. Town meeting must vote to approve all appropriations for the upcoming fiscal year in advance of setting a tax rate. This collection of appropriations is referred to as the budget. The budget process, however, is not simply the list of appropriations for a particular fiscal year. It is the entire set of steps by which the final product, the budget document, is created and managed. A good budget process includes six well defined steps. The first is the planning step. As part of this step, communities should clearly define the time frame within which each subsequent step should be completed. A written calendar or time line distributed to all players involved will inform them of when their responsibilities are expected to be fulfilled.


this is from a document put out by the Massachusetts division of local services. There are also Massachusetts General laws, which we have been told, trump local by-laws.

posted by Jeff Bennett