Budget Visualizations for Cities

February 28, 2017

Budget Visualization & Taxpayer Receipt Tool

Helping budget offices communicate with citizens and elected officials

Take your budget document and turn it into something beautiful…

Current partners

Charlottesville (advanced version), Albemarle, LexingtonDanville, and Warrenton

Features

Budget Process Interactive Timeline to encourage engagement
Responsive design
Taxpayer receipt function (optional)
Direct links to the sources of the data
Tooltips and comments for each line item
Presents past actuals, current budgets, and forecasts
Data available for download (and JSON)
Easily discerned trends
Simple data format (CSV by line item)

Examples

Simple (past and current budgets only)
Advanced (includes proposed versus actuals)

Pricing

Contact us!  Our pricing is subsidized in Virginia and is as much as 80% less than private vendors.

FAQ

What is Smart Cville?

We are a Charlottesville-based non-profit dedicated toward leveraging technology to solve public problems.  We’ve donated hundreds of hours to build this tool to help municipalities communicate complex budget systems to elected officials and citizens.

How long does it take city staff to manage this tool?

Less than 30 minutes each year to update existing templates.  We set-up the templates and initial years for your staff.

If you’re a non-profit where does the money go?

Annual fees for this project are put back into project maintenance, feature expansion, growth, and Smart Cville management of each instance.

Can we make customizations?

Yes, minor customizations are included in the setup cost.  Function customizations can be discussed.

Who uses this system currently?  Can we talk to them?

City of Charlottesville, City of Lexington (VA) and Albemarle County and yes can connect you with someone.

When other solutions cost 3-10x this amount, how can you offer this affordably?  

We’ve built our solution based on open source software.  The city of Charlottesville contracted our services to extend the software for the advanced version and also allowed us to share their improvements with other municipalities.   There are other great products from great companies (like OpenGov) that offer different/more features for a much higher price.