BudgetLens

BudgetLens is a web app (with optional mobile companion) that helps residents, journalists, and civic groups understand where local government money actually goes. It ingests published budget PDFs, spreadsheets, and check registers, normalizes vendors and departments, and provides simple search, trend charts, and “what changed” comparisons between fiscal years. Users can set alerts for specific vendors, programs, or spending categories and export clean tables for reporting. This is not a magic transparency wand: if a city doesn’t publish data, the app can’t invent it, and some documents will be ugly scans that require manual cleanup. The MVP focuses on a narrow set of common municipal formats and a small number of jurisdictions to ensure accuracy. Revenue comes from newsroom/civic org subscriptions and optional municipal licenses for better public-facing portals.