SpendingLens

SpendingLens is a web app (with optional mobile companion) that makes local government spending understandable and verifiable. It continuously pulls vendor payments, purchase orders, council agendas, and budget PDFs from city/county sites and open-data portals, then normalizes them into a single searchable ledger. Users can track a vendor across departments, see spending trends over time, and get alerts when a new contract, amendment, or unusually large payment appears. The AI layer helps extract line items from PDFs, match vendor name variants, and summarize agenda items in plain language—while always linking back to the original source document for auditability. Realistically, the hardest part is data quality and coverage: many municipalities publish inconsistent files. The MVP should focus on a small set of states/metros and do them extremely well, rather than pretending to cover everyone.