Working with Budgets and Spending Data

Curriculum

4 Sections
20 Lessons
Lifetime

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Categorization and reference data
Need to put your data on a map but it doesn't contain Latitude and Longitude values? Read on!
5
Choosing an audience and classifying your data
Sometimes you will need to classify your financial data, for example, to reflect services that people care about or to conform to internationally recognised standards.
5
What is the difference between budgets and spending?
Before we begin working with the data, let's take a closer look at the difference between budgets and spending data - what questions is it possible to answer with this data?
7
Cleaning spending data
A quick introduction to why spending data often needs cleaning, following into a recipe for cleaning spending data with Open Refine.
3

Introduction

One of the most powerful ways of making data more meaningful for analysis is to combine it with reference data and code sheets. Unlike transaction data – such as statistical time series or budget figures – reference data does not describe observations about reality – it merely contains additional details on category schemes, government programmes, persons, companies or geographies mentioned in the data.

For example, in the German federal budget, each line item is identified through an eleven-digit code. This code includes three-digit identifiers for the functional and economic purpose of the allocation. By extending the budget data with the titles and descriptions of each economic and functional taxonomy entry, two additional dimensions become available that enable queries such as the overall pension commitments of the government, or the sum of all programmes with defence functions.

The main groups of reference data that are used with government finance include code sheets, geographic identifiers and identifiers for companies and other organizations.

Classification reference data

Working with Budgets and Spending Data

Curriculum

Introduction

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