CA Forward Report
A generation ago, the budget lived on 10-column ledger paper. It moved to Excel and annual print-outs, and later to a PDF posted online. But present practice no longer meets the demands of citizens or takes advantage of new technology. Transparency makes your budget numbers come alive, accessible at the level of detail desired by professional accountants and ordinary citizens.
Delphi Transparency enables officials and citizens to access municipal revenue and expenditure data online by fund, department, or type of account. CFOs, City Managers, and Council Members can connect with the public like never before.
Transparency works in conjunction with a traditional budget, allowing anyone to dig into the numbers. In addition to the budgeted numbers, the average site includes up to five years of actual spending and revenue data – from Fund or Department totals down through the organization and all the way to the individual object level. No other product does that.
Our patent-pending, proprietary graphing library marries the latest technology with the design and experience requirements of government professionals and ordinary citizens. Using the latest data-handling and human-interface technology, we let the software do the work and make it truly easy for the user.
Uploading your data takes hours, not months. If your Finance people send files to your auditors you can probably use the same files for Transparency. Neither the software nor users go behind your firewall or into your accounting system. As for price, it probably costs less than a print order for the annual budget book.
Transparency lets department teams access their operating budgets, results and history data when and how they need it.
Instead of logging into the accounting system and struggling to operate the complex system, they go to a simple, comfortable, screen on the web browser, select the data they need and drop it into Excel or a pastable PNG format, working at their own desktop and their own schedule.
The purpose of transparency is to build a foundation of trust between governments and their communities. Unfortunately, most efforts to offer transparency do not produce the desired level of trust. Data is not intelligence, and unorganized data will inevitably lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Accordingly, more data alone does not equal more wisdom nor more trust.
To solve this problem, the concept of "managed data" has emerged in the transparency world. Managing data involves consolidating, refining, summarizing, and presenting data in ways that provide context and limit confusion. Packaging data in this way not only assists analysis and aids decision-making, but also builds bridges to the community by giving citizens an accessible entry point to the government finance world.