Ever wonder where your tax dollars go? Today, the City of Plano launched a new innovative transparency tool that allows citizens to view the city’s financial data. It’s called Open Budget, a website where citizens can see where their taxpayer dollars are going.
Open Budget is an important milestone on the path towards becoming a data-driven government. Charts, graphs and maps make the data more accessible and understandable. Citizens can use interactive features to find answers to their questions.
With the launch of this site, Plano is among the best-in-class digital governments, ensuring that financial data is easily accessible and understandable for citizens. Open Budget is powered by Seattle-based software-as-a-services provider, Socrata, the leading global provider of open data and government performance management solutions. Plano leveraged Socrata’s financial transparency suite of applications, which makes it easy for governments large and small to publish budget, spending and payroll data quickly, economically, and in a consumer-friendly way.
Rather than wading through hundreds of pages of scanned documents of legal and financial information, citizens and staff see financial data contextualized in charts, graphs, and images that are attractive, navigable, and easy to understand.