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.

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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

A Tale of Two Developments

You probably wouldn’t be able to tell these two buildings apart, yet their economic performance couldn’t be more different. A deep dive by geospatial firm Urban3 shows why that’s the case.

Accounting
A Tale of Two Developments
Northwest Arkansas by the Numbers: Stability or Sugar Rush?

What the Finance Decoder revealed about Fayetteville, Springdale, and Siloam Springs—through the eyes of a local Strong Towns member.

Accounting
Members
Northwest Arkansas by the Numbers: Stability or Sugar Rush?
Six Roundabouts to Nowhere

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.

Accounting
Streets
Six Roundabouts to Nowhere
This Small Restaurant Outperforms Walmart — Here’s Why

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.

Accounting
This Small Restaurant Outperforms Walmart — Here’s Why

Finance in a Strong Town

Your city can't afford to keep its promises. Strong Towns is uncovering why, and offering a way forward.