Munetrix™ is a web based information source designed to give instant access to financial information for municipal goverments and stake holders.
The tool allows for financial forecast and trend analysis including fiscal indicator scores and best-practice benchmarking.
In essence, Munetrix is designed to:
The State of Michigan Indicator system is a digital system in that it returns a 1 or 0 for each of the nine factors in reference to their respective trigger.
Behind the scenes, however, is actually a nice set of ratios that can be used to compare the fiscal performance of municipal governments.
One of the factors, General Fund Operating Deficit, is best viewed in a graph plotting the actual ratio over time.
Munetrix stores the municipal government data in a hierachy in this order; State --> Regional Planning Office --> County --> Local Unit.
This hierarchy permits users to view data at a highlevel and progressively drilldown to specific local units.
The example below has been grouped by county and filtered at the region level to show the average for all communtieis in the seven counties represented by the regional planning office; in this case SEMCOG.
In addition to the Fiscal Distress Indicator scoring system, Munetrix also stores government expenses grouped in ten major categories of spending.
By comparing the spending habits of munciapal governemnts to industry best-practice benchmarks, one can get a picture of a community's public service priorities.
One of the features of the Munetrix software tool is the ability to create a list of municipalities, called favorites, with which to compare data.
The graph below is showing the comparatives for a collection of cities similar to the City of Port Huron, Michigan.
It should be pointed out that the names of the cities have been masked.
Although the data collected is public information, the collection and anlaysis of the data in many cases needs further explanation.
These restricted graphs are available to users of the system who have purchased licenses.