Glendale upgrades 'Follow Your Money' tool - WFXG FOX54 Augusta - Your News One Hour Earlier

Glendale residents can follow the city's spending and compare how city departments are performing against their budgets with a recently upgraded online tool.

Follow Your Money enhances transparency and allows users to access the city's expense and revenue financial data to see clearly what's coming in and what's going out. [Click here to access the tool]

"With Follow Your Money, we have attempted to make a very complex financial system extremely easy for anyone to use and understand," said Diana Bundschuh, deputy chief information technology officer. "We wanted something that people would use, that provided full transparency to the public and the ability for them to see every detail of the city's spending."

The first phase of the tool was released to the public July 2012. It allows users the ability to easily search and download the current year's expenditure data as well as the previous three fiscal years. Searches can be conducted by fund, department and citywide spending along with vendor spending.

The tool provides a graph that shows total expenditures of the search and users can select how much data to view at once and how it is sorted, alphabetically or by amount. Users can also access spending on a specific date or payments to specific vendors. The tool is updated every 24 hours.

The second phase provides quarterly financial performance data for the selected fiscal year and previous three fiscal years in a graphical format that shows quarterly actuals versus budget data for expenditures and revenues.

While phase one focused on detailed information, phase two provides the amended budget, actuals, percentage of total budget and a three-year actual average for each quarter. The second phase provides an overall look at the city's budget that includes expenditures, revenues and all the city's financial funds that didn't exist in phase one.

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