Although only a small percentage of the money that the Federal government plans to spend to bolster the economy has actually been allocated, local governments are already trying to figure out if they will be getting their fair share.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IT tools for tracking allocations from the Federal government, most local governments don't have anything better than a spreadsheet on hand. That's unfortunate because one of the requirements for getting money from the Federal government is being able to conclusively show how it was spent. For a lot of towns and cities, that may mean spending a lot of time with cumbersome spreadsheets that are not particularly easy to figure out.

Trying to fill that gap for local municipalities and other organizations dependent on Federal aid is Actuate, which has released an Actuate Stimulus Management application that serves as a framework for visually tracking how much Federal aid and organization has received and, most importantly, how they are spending it.

Actuate build the application using the guidelines set forth in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to create a framework for tracking Federal funds using the business intelligence software and reporting tools that Actuate markets to corporations.

The basic idea is that given the fact that most government organizations are short on analysis tools. Actuate would build a customizable framework capable of tracking over 250 metrics that customers could invoke online as a service or deploy on their own systems. As part of that effort, Actuate is also giving customers copies of the demo software for the application to help train end users on how to master the application.

Perhaps even more interesting is how the application could be used to track the performance of local politicians in terms of how effective they are in bringing home the bacon to their constituents. The Federal government will be publishing data on how ARRA funds are being allocated across the nation, so it will be relatively simple for someone, such as a news organization, to generate charts that show how much money a particular locality might be getting compared to national averages. Some of that data might then actually figure into re-election bids.

The historic problem with government data has never really been getting access to it. The real problem is trying to make any sense of reams of data that is often suspiciously disorganized. Using simple reporting tools, therefore, may actually be a major step towards bringing some real accountability to government spending assuming the transparency that President Barack Obama talks so much about is worth at least $65 per user per month. The templates, however, are free to most existing Actuate customers.