Updating your finance module: A step-by-step guide

Overview

All Public Finance modules have three different access locations, one for each different use or need for the module. These are: the Data & Insights Admin page that configures the site, the Data & Insights Data/Performance site where the data is hosted, and finally the Public Finance module site itself (i.e Open Budget, Open Checkbook, etc.)

• Admin Panel: The admin page is accessed at https://admin.finance.socrata.com and can be accessed using your Data & Insights username and password. Once you have logged into this page you should see a list of your Financial modules. If you do not see any sites please contact datainsights-support@tylertech.com.
• Data & Insights Data Domain: This is where the datasets that power the module itself are hosted. In other words, this is where all the data used in your Finance site is located, and where you will update the data itself.
• Public Finance module: The module itself lives at its own unique URL. There are actually no customizations that occur on this site itself. It is simply a product of the data hosted on your data site and the configurations in the Admin page.

Reviewing Your Data

The first and most important step in updating your site will be to upload your new fiscal year data. The first thing you will want to do before updating your data is to review and confirm that your data is formatted correctly. The data should be in a flat structure, stored in a CSV or an Excel file. There are two sources you can use to ensure your data is in the correct format.

1. Each dataset has a schema doc located in the Data & Insights Knowledge base. To view the schema, select the appropriate article from the Public Finance Support page.
2. The second way to confirm the format of your data is to check the datasets that already exist on your data site. To quickly find these datasets, while in the admin panel, select Data Settings > Location > View Dataset.

Once you have reviewed the schema doc and the existing dataset you can ensure that your spreadsheet for each dataset matches the required schema exactly. This means that your data source should contain the same number of columns as the dataset online. It is not required for the columns to be in the same order or have the same name, but it is generally useful for them to match the data online exactly. Note: If you have added or removed optional columns from your dataset, the column count may not match.

If you have any issues or questions with mapping your data to the existing schema please contact datainsights-support@tylertech.com

Uploading Your Data

The next step will be to update your data on your Data & Insights Open Data site. To update the dataset you will need to have a Data & Insights Account with a site role permission of Publisher or Administrator, or be the owner of the dataset(s) that power your financial module.

To update the dataset you will want to first open the dataset in your web browser, the easiest way to do this is through the View Dataset button discussed in the previous step. There are a couple different options in choosing a method to update your dataset.

1. The first option is to update the dataset directly through the Web Interface. This is done through the Append and Replace Wizard. You can see more about using this tool here: The Append and Replace Wizard.
2. You could also use another one of the integration tools such as Data & Insights Datasync, FME, or the publisher API.

One of the important choices when uploading your dataset is whether you would like to use Append or Replace. If your source data sheet has only the most recent years’ data, you should use Append. If your source spreadsheet contains all years’ data, you will want to replace the data.

Once the data has been fully updated, you will need to ensure that the dataset is set to public. If the dataset is private and you would like to keep it private, please be sure to share the dataset with appsteam@socrata.com. You can find more information on using private dataset here.

Updating Fiscal Year in the Admin Panel

The default fiscal year that you module displays is hard-coded in the Administration panel, so in order to have your module display the most recent data upon initial navigation, you’ll want to make sure to update your fiscal year settings after you’ve added the most recent data. To do this, navigate to

Dataset Settings > Time Period

Simply enter the fiscal year for your newly added data, and your module should reflect the new data immediately once you have successfully updated your dataset and updated the current fiscal year in the Admin Panel. We also recommend clearing your browser cache or doing a hard refresh to make sure you are seeing the updated module.

Viewing your Public Finance Site

Once you have updated your public finance site, you can view your changes to confirm that everything is working as expected. You can select the launch button from the admin panel to launch your financial module in a new tab. If everything looks good, congratulations your finance site is now up to date!!

Additional Resources

More information regarding financial module administration can be found here: Public Finance Support Resources.

If you run into any issues, or have questions that are not addressed in the documentation, please reach out to datainsights-support@tylertech.com.