Top 5 Council Rates Modelling Issues
Making Council Rates Modelling Better
For rates officers, finance managers and CFOs at local councils across Australia
Once a Year. Enormous Stakes. A Spreadsheet.
Every year, rates teams at councils across Australia go through the same ritual. The rating modelling period opens. Emails fly. Data gets extracted from your rates management system and invariably ends up in a spreadsheet that’s grown more complex, and more fragile, with every passing year. And then the race begins.
You’re working to model rates revenue accurately and fairly[LV3.1], across thousands of assessments, within a window that’s never quite long enough. The numbers you land on will determine how your council funds services for your entire community. There is no margin for error.
That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work, rates modelling teams are skilled professionals navigating genuinely complex legislation, valuation data, and differential rating structures. It’s a reflection of the fact that, until recently, there simply hasn’t been a better option purpose-built for what councils need.
That’s what we’ve been working to change.
The Five Pain Points We Hear from Every Rates Team
Over the past few years, AcQuum Consulting has worked closely with councils across Australia to understand what makes rates modelling painful. What we’ve heard is remarkably consistent, regardless of council size or state.
1. Data preparation eats the modelling window
Before you can model a single scenario, you need your base data to be right. That means pulling assessment data from your rates management system, cleaning it, validating it, and structuring it in a way that lets you model against it. For many councils, this process alone takes days, days that come directly out of an already time-pressured modelling period.
2. Spreadsheets slow, crash, and fail
Council rates databases are large. Running big volumes through a spreadsheet model isn’t just slow, it’s unreliable. Models crash. Files fail to save. Formulas aren’t refreshed or are deleted. The larger the dataset, the worse it gets.
3. Hard to change valuation models
The complexity of valuation models makes it hard to explore different levers and approaches to rates modelling. When a council wants to look at different approaches, it’s genuinely difficult to accurately compare different rates models. Getting the comparisons right, validating them, and being confident in the output for decision-making is a time-consuming and high-risk activity.
4. The process lives in one person’s head
Rates modelling is typically done by a small number of people, sometimes just one. When that person leaves, retires, or goes on leave, the council faces a genuine knowledge transfer problem. The process isn’t documented in any structured way; it’s embedded in a spreadsheet or other system that nobody else fully understands.
This creates key person risk that councils recognise but struggle to address with their current tools.
5. Data integrity issues are hard to find
If a property doesn’t have the right rate type assigned, or if a capped property has been carried across incorrectly from the prior year, finding that error in a spreadsheet model takes significant time and expertise. You must know what to look for, and even then, it’s easy to miss something until a figure looks unexpectedly different.
What Good Should Look Like
When we asked rates teams what they actually need, the answers were practical and specific.
A structured workflow that guides you through each step in the right order.
Reliable import of assessment data from your rates management system.
The ability to run and compare multiple scenarios quickly and easily.
Clear visibility of how your valuation base is distributed.
An audit trail of decisions made during the modelling period.
The ability to export finalised parameters back into your system to validate the revenue figure before you commit.
None of this is unreasonable. In fact, it’s exactly what rates teams should expect from a modern modelling tool. The challenge has been that no solution to date has successfully delivered on all of these pain points.
Introducing the Rates Modelling Application
AcQuum Consulting, in partnership with Infor Pathway and in close collaboration with Australian councils, has developed a purpose-built Rates Modelling Application for local government. It is built on Infor EPM, a cloud-based enterprise performance management platform, with powerful modelling, reporting and scenario planning capabilities. For users of Infor Pathway SaaS, it is already included in your licensing fee.
The application is designed as a companion to Infor Pathway. Assessment data exports directly from your EPM environment. Parameters modelled within the application are exported easily back into Pathway, with no rekeying of data, and used to run a Rates Prediction Report, giving you validation of the final dollar figure before your council adopts the model.
The application provides a structured, step-by-step modelling workflow. It handles large assessment datasets without the performance issues inherent in spreadsheets. It makes comparisons between models easy, without the need for multiple excel spreadsheets and the issues related to this approach.
It supports valuation averaging, supplementary assessments, rate-type management, scenario comparison, and much more. And it provides the kind of audit trail and governance capability that spreadsheets simply cannot.
Council-led development
This solution has been developed with input from the people who actually do the complex work of rates modelling. If you’ve spent years waiting for something better than your current spreadsheet model, we’d like to talk.
Get in touch to book a discovery session, to explore if this is a good fit for your council needs or visit our Rates Modelling solution page to learn more.