Glendale residents can follow the city of Glendale’s budget through a comprehensive tool, Follow Your Money, available on the website.  This easy-to-use budget tool enhances transparency and allows users to access the city’s expense and revenue financial data to see clearly what’s coming in and what’s going out.

In 2010, the Arizona State Legislature passed Arizona Revised Statute (A.R.S.) §41-725, which established online comprehensive financial reporting requirements for Arizona and its local municipalities.  Although Glendale was in compliance with the statute through the publishing of its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report on the city website, the city’s Information Technology and Finance departments took the statute requirements for the state as a guide and created Follow Your Money to further promote transparency.  The first phase of the tool was released to the public July 2012.

“With Follow Your Money, we have attempted to make a very complex financial system extremely easy for anyone to use and understand,” stated Diana Bundschuh, deputy chief information technology officer. “We wanted something that people would use, that provided full transparency to the public and the ability for them to see every detail of the city’s spending.”

The first phase of Follow Your Money provided users the ability to easily search and download the current year’s expenditure data as well as the previous three fiscal years. Searches can be conducted by fund, department and citywide spending along with vendor spending.  The tool provides a graph that shows total expenditures of the search and users may select how much data to view at once and how it is sorted, alphabetically or by amount.  Users can also access spending on a specific date or payments to specific vendors; and Follow Your Money is updated every 24 hours.

Well done, Glendale!