Finance Decoder
The Check-Up Your City Can't Afford to Skip
Visualize the financial trajectory of your city.
Understand whether your city is on track to keep its development, service, and growth promises.
Recommended by national municipal finance institutions.
Years of budgeting, clarified in an afternoon.
Input a handful of your city's publicly-available financial numbers and automatically produce 7 indicator charts to visualize the financial trajectory of your place.
Unlock the Financial Trajectory of Your Place.
Get access to the the Finance Decoder worksheet, instructions, tutorials, and templates to share your results.
A Bottom-Up Map of Fiscal Trajectories
The fiscal health of our cities isn’t shaped by a single budget or council vote—it’s the result of decades of decisions, policies, and development patterns. Across the country, Strong Towns advocates are using the Finance Decoder to better understand their communities’ fiscal trajectories.
Explore their work, share your own, and help build a growing map of local insight.
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On becoming the coastal Cassandra.
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Let’s not tax houses to subsidize cars.
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When cities expand their boundaries, they aren’t just adding land, they’re taking on decades of financial obligations that short-term metrics fail to capture.
Finance in a Strong Town