Budget-Tracker

Inspiration

Fingal County Council's 2026 budget is 119 pages long. It's public, technically accessible, and written in a way that guarantees almost nobody will read it. That gap between "available" and "understandable" is where we wanted to build something.

What it does

You type in your Eircode. Budget Translator maps it to your local authority, pulls the real budget figures, and shows you what the money actually means: how much per resident goes to housing, roads, parks, and services, how that's shifted year-on-year, and where your area stands. There's also a one-click option to draft an email to your councillor if you want to do something with what you've found.

How we built it

Next.js 14 on the frontend, with a backend that ingests government budget PDFs and uses Claude to parse them into structured data. Eircodes map to local authorities via routing key, which is what lets us get away with a single input field. Claude does two jobs: turning messy PDF tables into clean JSON, then turning that JSON into something a person can actually read. The councillor email pulls from the real figures so it's specific, not generic.

Challenges we ran into

Government PDFs are not built for this. The Fingal budget alone is 119 pages of mixed tables, statutory text, and financial formatting. Sending the whole thing to the Claude API hit token rate limits immediately. The fix was extracting only pages 1–30.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The Fingal 2026 budget, €433.4m, actually parsed and readable in plain English by the end of the session.

What we learned

Public financial data is messy. PDFs that look fine in a viewer can be a nightmare to extract cleanly. Token limits hit you faster than expected when documents are large.

What's next for Budget Translator

Coverage across all 31 Irish local authorities, with automated ingestion each year as budgets are published. A year-on-year comparison view so you can track how priorities shift over time. Proper integration with the Eircode API for precise geo-mapping. And eventually, a public dataset of normalised Irish council budgets structured, searchable, and free because that resource doesn't currently exist anywhere.

Built With

• claude
• java
• next.js
• springboot