How can it be accessed and used?

Visual insights

From the Municipal Money home page you can search for the name of your local or district municipality or click on the map to go there directly. When the details of your selected municipality load, you will see a few different parts as you scroll down:

• Part 1: Contact information for the municipality
• Part 2: A summary of audit outcomes over the past few years. There is an explanation of the different audit outcomes on the right hand side.
• Part 3: Specific financial performance indicators. Two of the more interesting indicators are ‘Cash Balance’ which shows whether the municipality has money to pay salaries and suppliers; and ‘Fruitless and Wasteful Expenditure’ which shows whether spending was unauthorised or followed incorrect or illegal processes.
• Part 4: Income shows where money is sourced from.
• Part 5: Spending breaks down what money is spent on.

View Data Tables

You can view the data used to generate the graphs and analysis on the Municipal Money tool. You can view the helper video for more details or follow the example steps below:

1. Open the municipal data URL, scroll down and click on the Income and Expenditure card
2. Once the municipal data site has loaded, click on ‘Find a municipality’ in the drop down menu on the left side of the screen
3. Type the name of the municipality you are interested in (e.g. ‘Johannesburg’) and select it from the list (e.g. ‘City of Johannesburg, Gauteng’)
4. Click on the ‘Financial year end’ you would like to see data for (e.g. ‘2015’). For some years, particularly the most recent and oldest ones, you may see that data is missing - possibly due to a change in how this data is reported or because the data is not available.
5. Click on the drop down menu under ‘Amount type’ and select which statements you want. The default is ‘Audited Actual’.
6. In the top right corner click on ‘Download’ and select which filetype you would like the data in, Excel or CSV. The file will download onto your computer.

Use the API

To use the Municipal Money API endpoint browse the API documentation.

Subject to certain limitations, users are free to use the data on Municipal Money and published through the APIs freely and flexibly, for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, at no cost.