Checkbook NYC

Checkbook NYC is an open source financial transparency web application.

Checkbook provides transparent access to a city's or other jurisdiction's financial information, through web-based dashboard views that show activity in categories such as Revenue, Budget, Spending, Contracts, and Payroll. It also offers that information programmatically via APIs.

Checkbook operates on a read-only, filtered copy of a city's financial data. Confidential information like municipal employee's names and addresses are not even in the Checkbook database. Data is loaded via an extract-transform-load (ETL) process; a typical frequency for running the ETL import is a few times per week.

The New York City Office of the Comptroller runs a production instance of Checkbook NYC at http://checkbooknyc.com/.

Checkbook NYC is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.0. See the file LICENSE.md for details.

Installing Checkbook

(See the file INSTALL.md for details.)

Checkbook runs in a standard LAMP-stack environment: Apache HTTPD and Apache Solr, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Checkbook is built on top of Drupal, but you do not need to install Drupal first, as Checkbook's own source code includes the appropriate version of Drupal.

Checkbook NYC's installation and data management procedures were originally designed around the needs of New York City. Our goal is to make Checkbook portable to other jurisdictions; the installation and data import procedures are probably the areas that most need improvement to achieve that goal. (The code itself is production-ready, as New York City runs a live instance.) We welcome early-adopter feedback to help make these improvements.

Getting Help / Participating in Development

The source code to Checkbook NYC is available here:

  https://github.com/NYCComptroller/Checkbook

You can use the usual ways to interact with the project there (submit pull requests, file tickets in the issue tracker, etc), and we invite you to ask questions in the Checkbook NYC technical discussion forum:

  Web:    https://groups.google.com/group/checkbooknyc
  Email:  checkbooknyc {_AT_} googlegroups.com

You can post via web or email; either way, you don't need to be subscribed to post.