Douglas County rolls out in-house public budget tool to replace Socrata product

At the Feb. 4 meeting staff demonstrated a new Douglas County in-house public budget reporting tool intended to replace the Socrata/OpenBudget product the county previously used.

Brooke said the county launched Socrata in 2017 and has paid roughly $18,000 annually for the vendor product but found it required manual exports and uploads. The new in-house application, built with the county’s IT team, creates an API that directly links the finance system to the public-facing site, reducing manual work for finance staff and allowing more timely refreshes. Brooke showed how users can toggle fiscal years, drill into funds and departments, and create multi-year comparisons.

Staff said the tool went live the day of the meeting. It includes features staff highlighted as improvements over the previous platform: better branding and county-site linkage, a refresh date visible to users, drilldowns to account-level detail and a ‘‘where it’s going’’ flowchart that traces funds from adopted budget through accounts. IT and finance staff also described a community partner portal for uploading IRS 990s, tax forms and financial statements; staff said they plan to expand the portal to accept invoices and performance measures.

Commissioners asked about future enhancements, including a mill-levy calculator, narrative fields to tell the budget story and the ability to include unaudited current-year actuals for quarterly reporting. Staff said they will explore those features and that the in-house approach should lower vendor costs and make it easier to integrate with the county’s ERP over time. The item was informational and required no action.