Residents test tradeoffs and send back budget scenarios with context.
For budget communication, planning, and public response
Make your local budget interactive and participatory.
Civic Budget is the CivicTally product for cities and towns that want one place to publish the budget, collect resident budget submissions, and explain how they compare to similar communities.
Interactive municipal budget portal
FY 2027 planning Total budget overview $452.6M Public-facing budget communication
Benchmark against similar towns and cities by category, total spend, and per resident.
What Civic Budget delivers
Three tools for the same job: clearer budget communication.
The product stays consistent across every deployment: a public budget site, a resident budget simulator, and a peer comparison view. The value depends on who owns communication, planning, and constituent response.
Public-facing
A public budget site people can actually use
Publish the adopted budget in a format residents can browse by category, line item, and context instead of asking them to work from a PDF.
FY2026 municipal budget $452.6M total
Residents 95,074
Per resident $4,761
Participation
Resident budget submissions with context
Give residents a simulator to build their own budget, see tradeoffs, and submit feedback that is grounded in the actual numbers.
Budget gap -$8.4M Can the resident close it?
Residents see tradeoffs before they submit feedback.
Benchmarking
Peer comparisons for the questions you always get
Compare spending, tax rates, and service mix against similar communities so staff and elected officials can answer why your budget looks different.
Peer cities Per-capita spending
$4,761
$5,433
$5,255
$4,318
Why it works
It gives residents context before they respond.
Budget conversations improve when residents can see where money comes from, where it goes, and what has to move if they want something to change. Civic Budget makes that visible before the hearing starts.
- Import your adopted budget and map categories once.
- Publish an interactive site with transparency, simulator, and education modules.
- Review resident submissions and compare your budget against similar communities.
Peer benchmarking
Answer a question every local government gets:
“How do we compare to towns like us?”
Show per-capita spending, tax rates, and category-level comparisons against similar communities so staff and elected officials can answer with evidence instead of approximation.
Explain differences in school costs, debt, public safety, and benefits without asking residents to decode spreadsheets.
Collect budget ideas after people have seen the tradeoffs, not before.
Buyer-specific messaging
Civic Budget is built for finance directors, town managers, and city councils.
Each of these buyers looks at the same product through a different lens: public budget communication, operational planning, or constituent response. The product stays the same, but the buying case changes.
Finance Directors
Reduce the amount of manual budget translation your team has to do every season.
- Publish the adopted budget in a format residents can navigate by fund, category, and line item.
- Give people context before hearings so staff spend less time answering the same baseline questions.
- Use peer comparisons to explain differences without rebuilding custom charts for every meeting.
Town Managers
Make budget communication and budget planning part of the same public process.
- Give residents a structured way to submit budget ideas instead of relying on open-ended frustration.
- Frame decisions around service impacts, constrained revenues, and tradeoffs the public can see.
- Support workshops, annual meeting preparation, and year-round budget education from one public portal.
City Councils
Give elected officials a shared reference point for budget conversations with constituents.
- See how spending compares across categories, years, and similar communities.
- Use the simulator to discuss concrete scenarios instead of abstractions.
- Point residents to one trusted budget site instead of fragmented PDFs, slides, and screenshots.
Part of the CivicTally suite
Civic Budget fits into the broader CivicTally product suite.
Use it as a standalone budget site or position it alongside other CivicTally products for resident reporting, public visibility, and digital participation.
Public-facing budget explorer
Budget balancing simulator
Resident submission workflow
Peer city comparison views
Budget glossary and explainers
Embeddable CivicTally product suite integration
Next step
Publish the budget in a format residents can use.
Civic Budget is for local governments that want a better public budget site, better resident input, and a clearer process for answering constituent questions.