New AI tools to cut workload in city budgeting

A set of beta AI features has been introduced to help city finance teams cut down on manual tasks and improve the way municipal budgets are presented to the public.

The tools, developed by ClearGov, focus on reducing repetitive work, supporting compliance with recognised standards, and making complex financial information easier for citizens to understand.

Speaking to Cities Today, Chris Bullock (pictured), CEO of ClearGov, said the developments build on existing digital budgeting platforms that already save local governments “hundreds of hours compared to traditional methods”.

“With just a few clicks, they can build a budget book complete with best-practice content and any chart or graph they need,” he added. “New features like Narrative Generation and Document Import extend these time savings even further–automatically drafting narratives and making it easy to add external content. By offloading these tedious tasks to AI, Finance Directors can spend less time on manual work and more time focusing on strategic priorities.”

Narrative Generation is designed to produce draft explanations to accompany charts and graphs. The aim is to give readers clearer context on financial trends while allowing finance teams to refine and expand on the text.

“Narratives are paired with graphs to provide readers with context around the data and trends they’re viewing,” Bullock said. “These narratives are essential for translating financial data into something the average citizen can understand–without them, meaningful public engagement is difficult to achieve.”

Another feature, Document Import, enables externally created PDFs to be uploaded and automatically converted into a digital format, extracting and embedding tables, text and images into financial reports.

The free Budget Book Evaluator, also in beta, is intended to help municipalities benchmark their reports against US Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) standards. Bullock explained: “The tool provides municipalities with feedback directly aligned to GFOA best practices, helping them identify gaps and opportunities for improvement before submitting for award consideration.”

Bullock confirmed that further AI features are in development but declined to provide details.

“Our focus is clear: delivering solutions that make municipalities more productive and help them build trust and support,” he said. “AI will play an integral role in how we continue to accomplish this in new and increasingly impactful ways.”

Image: ClearGov/LinkedIn