Budget season might as well be football or basketball season if you are Melissa Sellers. In her three years as the city’s budget officer, Sellers’ loud cheering and spontaneous dancing have become daily routines.

Finance offices are not known for liveliness. So co-workers value what Sellers brings to morale.

“She’s very bubbly,” says city accounting system analyst Diane Hamby.

“(Melissa) has an enthusiasm that is contagious,” says Chief Finance Officer Robert Martin.

Government accounting is a highly structured activity. And that’s why Seller’s gets so revved up to do it. The rows and columns of a neat spreadsheet. The strict protocol of an audit. The tabbed, color-coded binders that make massive financial reports easy to navigate. Order is such a splendid thing.

“(Accounting) suits my personality,” Sellers’ explains.

At home, Sellers’ refrigerator is so spotless and so organized, she can instantly recite the location of its contents.

“Carbonated drinks on the right, milk on the left and teas in the middle,” Seller says without a hitch.

This fixation on organization pointed her toward accounting a decade ago. She double majored in accounting and business management at Kentucky Wesleyan University in Owensboro.

After that it was four years at a public accounting firm in Madisonville, where she’s from. Sellers’ corporate job exposed her to a range of accounting services, including tax preparations for businesses and nonprofits.

But it was the public audits she liked best. The systematic process examined every nook and cranny of a government entity’s fiscal practice. After many hours of hard work, she had a 100-page report to show for it, a document that gave the public a clear window into how their tax dollars were managed.

“It felt very gratifying,” Sellers said. 

Part of Sellers's success in three years on the job comes from the strong rapport she has built with the city's accounting staff.

Now Sellers gets to do government accounting full time. She spends her days overseeing the expenditures of each city department. When a department head like the fire chief, for example, plans to send two of his firefighters for a certain safety training, he will notify Sellers about the expected cost of the training. Sellers can instantly pull up the fire department’s allocation for training on a computer database and determine whether there is enough money left to pay for it. If the budget covers it and the expense has clear public benefit, she records it as an encumbrance. The expected expense will be tracked until the money is actually spent and is processed by accounts payable. If the budget is insufficient, she and the fire chief can discuss possible transfers from other funds.

The constant communication between Sellers and department heads enables her to have a good grasp of whether city government is staying within its means.

It also enables her to gain cooperation on new practices. During her first budget season in 2008, she compiled more than a dozen formats of budget requests.

Agency heads created their own presentations from scratch. Hence, spreadsheets emphasized and included different statistics. Rationales for increases in funding weren’t always clear. And comparing the requests was apples to oranges.

For consistency’s sake, Sellers fine-tuned a template that clarified the format of requests. Then she taught each agency how to fill it out. The following budget season, requests went more smoothly.

And as her boss Robert Martin points out, it was finally possibly to compare the requests of different departments.

The real fun for Sellers begins after the hearings. She and Martin sit down with Mayor Dan Kemp and study the budget proposal line item by line item.

“We start by asking how much we would have left if we funded every request,” Sellers said.” Based on that, we compare each budget request with allocations from previous years and weigh the cost-benefit of any potential increase. The mayor looks to Robert for revenue projections and then makes his decisions.”

When the mayor finally submits his budget to the committee level, Sellers attends the sessions to notes the comments of city councilmen. Based upon their input, Sellers will prepare various drafts of the budget. Then in the heat of a city council meeting, the mayor can quickly reference how a council motion might affect the budget.

Sellers started working on the 2010-11 budget in March. City council passed it at the end of June.

But the long, grinding road to an approved budget isn’t all work. Sellers likes to celebrate progress. So don’t be surprised if she runs across the hall to where her accounting staff works and show off a bar chart of spending trends. And if you pass her office and hear a Braveheart-like yell through the walls, don’t be alarmed. That just means Sellers is savoring the moment of finishing a big task.

“Sometimes I worry that I’m going to do that right when the mayor walks in,” Sellers said.

The same high octane passion fuels Sellers’ charity work too.  She co-chairs the government division  for the local United Way’s efforts to raise money from government employees. Her “tireless dedication” that resulted in a surge in giving to United Way was recognized last year with receiving J. William Flowers Memorial Award .

Sellers says the experience helped endear her to a new community. Her house in Madisonville is currently up for sale. She plans to move to downtown Hopkinsville.