Matanuska-Susitna Borough

Borough releases Online Checkbook

Mat-Su | Jack Horner | Tuesday, June 02, 2020

Visit Online CheckBook

On Monday June 1, the Mat-Su Borough proudly released a preliminary version of it's new Online Checkbook dashboard. This tool an interactive website that puts payment information for nearly all Borough expenditures at your fingertips. This data allows citizens to view who received payments for goods or services, and how much they received. This data can be explored by searching for specific payee names, or by browsing by services or categories. This website allows the user to drill down from aggregated spending accounts, to each individual payee payment. Additionally, the raw data is available to anyone through the Borough's Open Data Site. This data is updated weekly.

Background

The Assembly passed Resolution 2020-023 on April 7, directing the Manager to develop a plan and budget for a proposal to post the Borough’s checkbook online. The Finanace and IT departments developed that plan and briefed the Assembly on May 5, and set a go-live target for July 1.

The tool is an app that uses the Borough's Open Data site which exposes data sets for public use and inspection. These can be related to finance/budget, assesment, mapping, science, and more. As well as serving a key transparency role, these data sets can also be used by websites, mapping apps, or mobile devices.

Development

This tool was developed in-house using staff time and existing tools. It took a team of 8 a total of approximately 100 hours.
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