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Michigan Firm Offers Municipal Spending Dashboard

KEEGO HARBOR -- For the first time, taxpayers can clearly see how officials are spending their tax dollars.

As financial managers in municipalities across the state of Michigan struggle with Gov. Rick Snyder's mandate to be more transparent with how they manage taxpayer money, a Michigan firm is offering powerful tools to help municipalities navigate these economically-troubled waters.

Munetrix LLC has just released its new on-line Cloud-Based Dynamic Dashboard, which automatically generates performance metrics on year-over-year changes to Key Data measures for all 1,800-plus municipalities in the State of Michigan.

The company says Munetrix Dashboard also shows citizens how their local leaders are performing as compared to those in other cities and towns.

"Munetrix is all about helping communities help themselves," said president Bob Kittle. "Most important is that municipal leaders can chart their future financial course in order to avoid trouble as it relates to a vetted Financial Scorecard."

Why is that important? Last fall, then-candidate Snyder stated that government financial reports should come with a warning: "Not fit for human consumption."  Since his election, Snyder has formally tied crucial state revenue sharing dollars to compliance with his transparency initiative under a program called Economic Vitality Incentive (EVIP).  Giving managers and taxpayers the ability to easily grasp this information and drill down to more specific detail using easy-to-understand charts and graphs is one of the key attributes of the Munetrix Cloud-Based Dynamic Dashboard. Munetrix allows municipalities to meet the EVIP requirements with the least amount of effort.

The Munetrix tool with the CBDD also allows for an unlimited amount of municipal comparative analysis using both historic and manually-loaded future financials.

"City administrators like to compare their performance against other communities, and Munetrix does this in every category we measure, apples-to-apples, and uses normalized data put into context," Kittle said.

It also has a social media aspect to it, since communities basically become "friends" with one another when they build their comparables.

More at www.munetrix.com.

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