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.
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.
Latest Stories on Accounting
What do you get when you combine too much funding, a broken development model, and no clear priorities? A six-roundabout interchange built to serve big-box stores that are already closing.
What do a taqueria, a bike shop, and an art center have in common? They’re all outpacing a retail giant when it comes to property tax revenues.
An intersection redesign in Fairbanks, Alaska, proves that road projects are not always improvements—and that DOT priorities are often out of touch with reality.
As Norwalk navigates a housing crisis, one thing is clear: the path forward isn’t scale for scale’s sake—it’s building smarter, more affordably, and with the community in mind.
Finance in a Strong Town