Methodology

No black box. Every grade is explainable.

Six ingredients. One letter. Industry-calibrated against Moody's, GFOA, NRPA, and ISBE references. This page shows you what goes into the grade.

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Anatomy of a grade — six ingredients
Ingredient 01

Revenue Health

How diversified and sustainable your income is. Herfindahl index across revenue buckets. High diversity means you're not dangerously dependent on one sales-tax generator, one state aid line, or one program.

Ingredient 02

Debt Position

Debt Service Coverage (Moody's 1.2× minimum) and Debt-to-EAV ratio against state statutory caps (2.875% park/library, 8.625% muni, 6.9% school in Illinois). Proximity to your legal ceiling matters.

Ingredient 03

Capital Investment

Capital as share of total spending. Below 5% signals deferred maintenance — your pipes and buildings are aging faster than you're replacing them. Above 10% indicates active stewardship.

Ingredient 04

Structural Balance

Recurring operating surplus or deficit, stripped of one-time items (bond proceeds, capital). Moody's flagship sustainability metric. A district can look balanced overall while secretly running a structural deficit.

Ingredient 05

Peer Percentile

Where you rank against similar agencies — same type, same state, similar size. Bayesian shrinkage handles small peer groups. Separate "public-source" and "with-submission" medians prevent selection bias.

Ingredient 06

Trend

Three-year trajectory on each core indicator. Improving, stable, or declining matters more than a single snapshot. Requires 2+ years of audit history — one reason multi-year upload is rewarded with a badge.

Type-specific models

One grade doesn't fit all agencies.

Park districts and school districts have fundamentally different missions. We model them differently.

Park Districts, Libraries, Municipalities

Weighted roll-up of the six core ingredients above, with type-specific adjustments — park districts add a Cost Recovery Rate metric (NRPA benchmark 30-40%); libraries weight Per-Capita Investment and Collection Turnover more heavily.

School Districts — Five-dimension scorecard

A separate model: Academic (30) + Climate (20) + Teaching (20) + Fiscal (15) + Equity (15) = 100. Built from the Illinois Report Card public data set. See each dimension's sub-metrics on the School Districts page.

Industry calibration

Benchmarks that practitioners recognize.

Moody's

Bond-rating criteria inform Debt Service Coverage thresholds. 1.2× is the published minimum; we surface that on every card.

GFOA

Government Finance Officers Association best-practice guidance on fund balance, capital ratios, debt limits.

NRPA

Park-specific benchmarks: cost recovery, capital reinvestment, program revenue. Peer medians published nationally.

ISBE

Illinois State Board of Education's Financial Profile designations (Recognition/Review/Warning/Watch) and the Report Card scorecard.

Data sources

Every number, traceable.

Official state sources: Illinois Comptroller annual filings · California State Controller public data · Indiana Gateway bulk downloads · Ohio Auditor of State · Colorado Office of State Auditor.

Structured federal data: US Census (population, demographics) · NCES (school data).

State-specific academic data: Illinois Report Card 2025 public data set (858 districts, zero API cost).

Agency-submitted: Audited CAFRs, budget books, community surveys — uploaded by agencies to improve their grades and correct extraction errors.

Never used as primary data: Survey opinions, trade-press rankings, crowdsourced reviews.

See the methodology applied.

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