Your job as analyst is to recommend realistically the necessary changes to put the budget back into balance. This will involve reducing ONLY those portions of your department's funding that comes from the General Fund, in most cases a substantial portion of the funding, but not always. This assignment is the first one that requires you to write a memorandum ("memo"). It's an administrative document used chiefly to communicate to and among management. As the analyst, your job is to make the situation and the choices the department faces clear. The spreadsheet work you do will tell you what you need to know about the level and location (within the budget) of the changes. The choices you'll inform management about will result from the changes and should be consistent with the level and location of the changes--but without requiring computations of various scenarios. Just consider your choices (reduce staff, eliminate cost-of-living-adjustments (COLA), cut contracts, and so forth), so that you come up with something reasonable and believable