Working with Budgets and Spending Data

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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!
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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.
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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?
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Cleaning spending data
A quick introduction to why spending data often needs cleaning, following into a recipe for cleaning spending data with Open Refine.
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Tasks

Find out – does your country use a standard classification for its data such as COFOG?
If you have code sheets for your data – try combining them with your main dataset.
If relevant: Try geocoding your data. For example – does your data include particular projects? Can you find an address for them? If so, you can geocode them and put them on a map! Take a look at the geocoding lesson if you need more help.
If you have spending data, try to answer the question “how much did company X receive from government”. You may need to correct typos and find out answers to questions such as “is company X” the same thing as “company X Ltd” (this is why having organisational identifiers is so important!)? If there is company data for your country, use the OpenCorporates reconciliation service to find out more information about the company (on the right hand side of the page on OpenCorporates.com).

Company and organisational identifiers