FIT

It's an understatement to say that COVID-19 has presented significant challenges this year. We have witnessed its devastating effects physically, prompting us to take extra health precautions and increase virus testing. At the same time, it's important to take precautions fiscally to ensure local governments maintain financial health. With decreased revenue and increased costs, local governments must be especially vigilant and use reputable resources and tools to inform them when making difficult financial decisions.

A new reporting feature in the Financial Intelligence Tool makes it simple for a local government to project its data into the future. Governments, with their often limited or restricted resources, have a responsibility to plan for the future. That management responsibility is often required by state law through the budgeting process. Although a local government won't hear from us about how to budget or plan for the future, it can still take advantage of our statutory requirement to publish each government's financial data, which we do using FIT.

Look forward

If you haven't checked out the Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) for a while, new information is available to you! We refresh FIT data quarterly to capture updated and newly filed local government data.

Financial planning and forecasting are essential activities of finance and leadership, and especially so in the age of COVID-19.

The Financial Intelligence Tool's (FIT) financial health indicators provide “retrospective” measures of financial health based on historic data. However, any government can use these measures to help plan for the future.

Benefits from integrating FIT's financial health ratios

Our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) has long offered a way for users to examine data on specific governments, government types, and specific revenue or expenditure streams. For the first time, FIT has a way to view all important information on a specific government type in one place, using new government-type profiles.

These new profile views for all government types show unique statewide data, including:

The Financial Intelligence Tool's (FIT) role-based functionality has expanded, giving local governments even more leverage over their data. Upon logging into FIT, a local government user has access to these new features:

Financial indicators have received a meaningful update in our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT), making them even more useful by capitalizing on the power of FIT's statewide collection of financial data.

Comparison power

Each financial health indicator now shows both the mean and median for other governments of your type. A local government can view how its indicator compares to those of similar governments across the state.

Indicators refocused

Whether you are a new user, a casual explorer of data, or a government data power-user, SAO is here to ensure you feel confident using the Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT).

New users rejoice – Get FIT in 15-minutes or less!

We have refreshed our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) with fiscal year 2019 data submitted by local governments! FIT makes it easy for you to understand the financial information of local governments in Washington.

Not only did we release the fiscal year 2019 data, but FIT now includes new enhancements based on input from our users. These changes make it an even better and more transparent experience for you. The infographic below lays out what is new with FIT.

As a follow up to our #Gov101 series on fire districts, let's take a look at what we can learn about these governments using the Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT)! FIT contains financial data on nearly 2,000 governments in Washington, including over 350 fire protection districts.

Our infographic below merely scratches the surface; there are amazing things to find through exploring the data. Everyone can find a story and learn about all the governments serving our state. What will you discover this time?