Department Responsibilities
- Maintaining and administering the County’s financial records in conformance with GAAP
- Oversees financial operations in compliance with state and federal laws
- Ensuring fiscal responsibility and superior bond ratings
- Payroll administration
- Manage debt issuance and monitoring
- Long-range financial planning
- Vendor payments and maintenance within the financial system
- Federal government regulatory reporting
- Maintaining property and inventory records
- Grant accounting
- Cash and investment management
- Capital asset management
- Maintain the County’s cash and investments
- Prepare and administer the annual budget
- Bank reconciliations
General Accounting
General Accounting is responsible for:
- Maintaining and administering the County’s financial records in conformance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
- Long-range financial planning
- Overseeing financial operations in compliance with state and federal laws
- Capital asset management
- Federal government regulatory reporting
- Maintaining property and inventory records
- Grant management and oversight
- Financial statement reporting
- Bank reconciliations
Grants
Grants is responsible for:
- Grant Management and oversight
- Administratively manages and/or oversees all the county federal and state grants
- Administrative support to cobb county departments and agencies who independently manage their grant programs.
- Revenue and expenditure reconciliation and monitoring
- Processes grant reimbursement requests
- Budget monitoring
- Compliance monitoring and review
- Quarterly and annual ARPA reporting
Accounts Payable
Accounts Payable is responsible for:
- Vendor Payments through procurement process
- Vendor Payments via PCard processing
- PCard Bank Account Reconciliation
- Creation and maintenance of Vendor Master files and compliance
- Cobb Employee Travel booking and payment processing
- 1099 IRS Tax reporting
- Unclaimed Property governmental regulatory reporting
- Countywide Accounts Payable Electronic Content Management System
- Financial Payment Systems training for payables
- Establishing and ensuring purchase and payment compliance
New Vendors
Vendors who wish to do business with Cobb County must submit a completed Vendor Registration Form.
New Vendors can register online, and existing vendors can log in using our vendor webapp.
Confused? Read our online registration instructions.
Vendors can also download and submit a Vendor Registration Form and email the completed and signed form to vendor.enrollment@cobbcounty.org or mail the completed form to:
Cobb County Finance Department, Accounts Payable
100 Cherokee Street, Suite 400
Marietta, GA 30090
(770) 528-1501 (Fax)
We also offer a blank W9 Form for vendors who need one.
Payroll
Payroll is responsible for:
- Processing payroll for all County employees and Poll Worker
- Federal and State quarterly tax returns
- Judicial, Teachers and Tax Commissioners Retirement Reporting
- Vendor payments for payroll deductions.
- W-2 Reporting
- Administrator for Time & Attendance System
Budget
Recipient of the “2021-2022 Distinguished Budget Presentation Award”
The Budget Division is responsible for:
- Preparing and administering the annual budget
- Preparing Biennial Budget documents and books
- Preparing and publishing property tax millage rates
- Revenue and Expenditure Analysis
- Budgeting administrators for all County Departments
- Preparing the Annual Budget at a Glance documents
Treasury
- Manage, maintain, and invest all public funds for Cob County
- Administer short- and long-term debt issuance
- Safeguard the county’s investments assets and bank balances
- Cash and Investment Management
- Facilitate accurate and timely payments to both employees and vendors
General Information
Some miscellaneous statistics about the level of services Cobb County provides can be found on the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) page.
Accounts Payable checks are run once a week on Thursday. The Accounts Payable division is continuing its Paperless initiative with enrolling all Vendors for EFT to eliminate the "check printing" process and to cut down on costs.
Yes, there are some demographic statistics on the Economic Development Department's website.
October 1 – September 30
Vendors who wish to do business with Cobb County must go online and complete the Vendor Application at vendor.cobbcounty.org.
Once complete you should send a copy of your W9 to Vendor.Enrollment@cobbcounty.org, so they can activate your Vendor Number. Your Vendor Number will be "inactive" until a W9 is received.
Check the Human Resources (HR) website to find out if any openings currently exist. If there are, fill out an application form that can also be found at the HR website. Make sure it is received by the HR department by the date indicated on the job posting.
You may download an application, or learn more about benefits and the hiring process and check current openings in our HR Department.
Our investment objectives are to:
- Sufficiently diversify all funds so as to protect the principal from potential losses
- To obtain market rates of return while adhering to all state, federal and local laws and generally accepted accounting principles.
Our four goals concerning investments are, in rank order, legality, safety, liquidity, and yield.
Capital assets, which include property, plant, equipment, and infrastructure assets (e.g., roads, bridges, sidewalks, and similar items), are reported in the applicable governmental or business-type activities columns in the government-wide financial statements. Construction in progress (CIP) projects are added as a fixed asset at the time they are in service. The government defines capital assets as assets costing more than $10,000 and with an estimated useful life in excess of one year. Such assets are recorded at historical cost or estimated historical cost if purchased or constructed. Donated and seized capital assets are recorded at estimated fair market value at the date of donation.
The costs of normal maintenance and repairs that do not add to the value of the asset or materially extend asset lives are not capitalized. Improvements are capitalized and depreciated over the remaining useful lives of the related fixed assets, as applicable. Interest incurred during the construction phase of capital assets of business-type activities is included as part of the capitalized value of the assets constructed.
Capital assets of the primary government, as well as the component units, are depreciated using the straight-line method over the estimated useful lives.
Taxes
The Board of Commissioners reduced the millage rate (the measure used to assess property taxes) for 10 consecutive years from 1993 to 2002. The overall millage rate remained the same from 2002 to 2005 at 9.72 mills. The Board of Commissioners reduced the millage rate in 2006.
The General Fund was reduced by .03 mills to 6.82 mills; the Fire Fund was reduced by .09 mills to 2.56 mills; and the rate for the Debt Service Fund remained at .22 mills for a total of 9.60 mills.
In 2011 the Board of Commissioners raised the millage rate temporarily from 9.60 to 11.11 to adjust with the ever declining property tax rates. In 2014 the Board of Commissioners voted to lower the millage rate to 10.91.
The ten largest commercial taxpayers are:
- Georgia Power Co.
- Home Depot
- ATT/BellSouth Telecommunication
- Ohio Teacher’s Retirement Fund
- SP4
- Lockheed Martin Corp
- Cobb EMC
- CP Venture Five, LLC
- Cousins Properties
- Inland Properties
You can get information by accessing the Tax Assessors Web site at: cobbassessor.org.
You can get information by accessing the Tax Commissioners Web site at: cobbtax.org.
Auditing
Yes.
Each year an independent audit is conducted on the books of Cobb County Government. The March 10, 2022 auditors report states in part, “In our opinion, the accompanying the financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the respective financial position of the governmental activities, the business-type activities, the aggregate discretely presented component unit, each major fund, and the aggregate remaining fund information of the County, as of September 30, 2022, and the respective changes in financial position, and, where applicable, cash flows thereof and for the year then ended in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.”
The complete auditor’s opinion letter and other financial information are included in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) on this Web site.