Winter Haven unveils searchable online budget with live dashboards and translated interface

Katrina Hill, Winter Haven’s public affairs and communications director, demonstrated the city’s new online budget on the OpenGov platform, telling commissioners the site “has all of the same information that’s in the printed books that you all receive, each year, but in an online version that’s really easy to navigate and really easy to work through.” The web version features a table of contents, a reader’s guide, the annual budget letter, organizational charts and an overview tab with strategic-plan context and background about Winter Haven.

Hill showed commissioners how fund pages are structured to display two years of revenues, expenditure overviews and budgeted revenues, with visible fund and account numbers to help residents and staff find specific line items. She used the aquatics cost center to illustrate integrated performance metrics from the city’s Achieve It system, noting OpenSwim had “almost 15,000” participants in fiscal year 2025 and that September’s count was 633; FY26 metrics will populate in real time as departments input new data.

Brandon, a finance department staff member, walked through internal dashboards that department leaders can build for account monitoring, using airport fuel as an example: “based off what we have in this budget, they budgeted $1,160,000 and we have spent a little over $1,000,000 in airport fuel,” he said, adding that dashboards can be displayed as gauges, stacked bars, pie charts or tables and are updated nightly to provide current figures. Brandon said dashboards are an internal tool shareable only with designated users; the public-facing online budget remains the primary access point for residents.

The presentation also covered the 5-year capital improvement plan on OpenGov, where each project page includes maps, department contacts, estimated start and end dates, strategic-plan alignment, a narrative overview and project budgets. Hill said the platform supports accessibility by translating the budget into more than 70 languages while preserving table labels and currency (U.S. dollars).

Unidentified Speaker 1 praised the transparency the platform offers, noting the site allowed staff to quickly provide a local legislator with a link to the city’s debt schedules. The city said the online budget is mobile responsive and available now to residents; staff will continue to populate FY26 performance numbers as departments submit updates.

The commission did not take formal action on the presentation. Staff said the platform is already live for public viewing and that departments will receive training on dashboards and data input.