Elected officials, non-financial managers, the media, watchdogs, citizens. Provide your diverse audiences with intuitive tools for understanding the big picture without taking on financial or technological risk.
The opportunity
Nothing tells us more about a community's priorities and direction than its budget. The relative levels of resources devoted to various services, like recreation, protection, core infrastructure, and general administration provide one obvious perspective. But the breakdown of revenues and expenses within the services—for example, whether the community is building reserves, attracting senior government funding, opting for contractors over employees—provides another. And of course, both perspectives change over time, indicating changes in priorities and circumstances. Making sense of all this is a massive undertaking. But trying to make sense of this with conventional tools, such as budget books, financial statements, and public presentations makes the undertaking virtually impossible.
Interactive visual analytics provide an obvious solution to the frustrating limitations of paper (or PDF). However, the barriers to building such tools are substantial. Simply equipping your finance team with tools like Tableau or Power BI is unlikely to yield benefits since the critical prerequisite for useful visual analytics is an appropriate data warehouse, which in turn implies reliable data pipelines, carefully designed data models, reliable computation and storage infrastructure, and the expertise to tie it all together. This is what Benchcube Analytics offers.
Context
Interactive visual analytics is only part of the story, however. Benchcube provides a multi-organization data warehouse. Not only does this provide significant economies of scale and efficiencies, it permits Benchcube to place your information within context. Specifically, benchmarking with respect to peer communities is a fundamental part of our dashboard tools. Sure, all communities are different. But they are also similar enough that comparisons along a few carefully-constructed metrics can provide enormous insight.
Let us convince you
The easiest way to decide whether Benchcube offers a compelling benefit-cost proposition is to try it out. Constact us at info@benchcube.com for a risk-free trial using the data you already publish on your website and send to your auditor.
If you want a more general idea of how financial dashboards and benchmarking works you can take a look at the demo dashboards we receated using publically-available provincial data: