“When we transmitted the info to [our citizens] with OpenGov, it provided a better educated question that came back to me versus ‘what’s your general fund balance?’ or ‘what’s your revenue and expenditures.’ The questions became ‘why are you spending so much on this?’ So it's given me a better sense of what the community’s real issues were.”
"I love the fact that you can tell stories with it. I will show a metric on a pie chart or bar graph and can quickly show how it has changed over five years."
“With OpenGov we can capture the number of vendors by category, and share that data easily, which saves our team hours of time on reporting and assures compliance to federal code for reaching out to minority business owners."
"With OpenGov, the managers can better monitor their budgets and spending."
"The Asst. Airport Director is interested in seeing how much he paid for jet fuel versus how much he sold it for. Using OpenGov, he can save a link and have his profit margin right there in front of him whenever he wants to see it."
"I look at numbers all day, and expect to as part of my job. But when we are taking information to Council, the City Manager, Department Heads, it’s helpful to share financial information visually. It makes my job easier and it helps them do their jobs better."
"I looked at other products, but I felt that OpenGov was — from the outside looking in — far superior, and I thought it was very well suited for the town and how our data is reported. So we made the call."
"We can pull more information and more reports from OpenGov on the back end than we can from our own accounting software."
"It was such an easy implementation to do. It was just me that did the implementation. I didn’t need IT’s help to build the site."
"Oakland Park wins the GFOA Distinguished Budget Award every year, but you just can’t drill into data, especially across funds, in a static PDF like you can through a software platform like OpenGov."
"OpenGov was wonderful to work with, and there was nothing that wasn’t done to my satisfaction."
"Now that I can export the data from my accounting system and feed it directly into OpenGov, it saves me three to four days of work creating the report each quarter."
"I’ve had residents tell me that it’s a great thing for the city. It’s easier for them to read this than a CAFR."
"When a council member asked a question about a specific department or budget item, we were able to drill down and show them exactly where the data was. We have never had the capability to do that before."
"It really brought the budget closer to the people and made it more understandable."