Budget Resources
These documents are primarily geared toward City of Portland staff to assist with budget preparation, including guidance, timelines, trainings, and other resources.
Budget Equity Tool Resources
Five-Year Financial Plan Materials
Budget Manual
The Budget Manual is a general guide to budget development in the City of Portland. Although the guidelines and directions included in this manual are meant to be comprehensive, requests for new information, changes in direction, and adjustments in deadlines should be expected. In order to keep bureaus informed of any changes, the City Budget Office (CBO) uses budget memos, weekly communications, our website, and direct support to bureaus.
This Budget Manual is written for City of Portland staff involved in budget development. This primarily consists of city administrators and managers who have financial and budgetary oversight responsibilities and the bureau staff responsible for the technical preparation and development of budget documents.
You can find the full budget manual in the first link below. We have also broken out the manual into the following sections to help you more easily find the information you need.
The full 122-page manual for your reading pleasure.
Looking for the short version of what's in the manual? Check out these training slides.
An even shorter version of the training slides.
This section provides direction on budget guidance, changes from the previous year’s process, inflation assumptions, and the budget process calendar.
This is an overview of the City’s budget process, including bureau and CBO responsibilities during each phase of the budget.
This provides high level instructions regarding the entries in BFM, required narratives in PatternStream, and other required submittal documents. Bureaus should also refer to the BFM uPerform website for technical BFM instructions and support.
This section outlines goals of multi-year transition to program offer budgeting, provides details about each component of the program offer, and describes how to create and complete program offer forms in BFM.
This section is presented in two parts. Part 1 provides more information about the City’s performance management system, including roles and responsibilities of bureaus, CBO, and Council Offices; measure types, metadata, and reporting requirements, and a brief primer for bureaus on how to develop performance measures and determine measure targets. Part 2 includes technical instructions for how to enter performance measure values and metadata in BFM.
This section describes requirements for the Five-Year Forecast and Fee Studies.
This is a full list of each component of the Requested Budget Document submission, including format, required narrative, and page limits.
This section documents the interaction between SAP data and BFM personnel costs and shares the answers to FAQs. There is also a full Reporting Glossary outlining all of the reports available in BFM, what they show you, and how to use them. Lastly, there is a more detailed list of the technical checks that references the reports available in BFM to facilitate technical checks.
If you want to know the official rules about abbreviations, capitalization, hyphenation, and more, this is the place! There is also a detailed glossary of budget terms.