The City of Cerritos publishes its adopted budget every year. It is a public document, and it is also a PDF of about 370 pages. GreenLedger is our attempt to turn that document into something a resident, or a student in a government class, can explore in a few minutes. We built it between February and April 2026.
The Budget Explorer covers the city's seven departments across three fiscal years, 2023-24 through 2025-26. You can filter for sustainability-related spending, switch between total and per-resident figures, and open a ten-year trend chart drawn from the city's OpenGov data. A tax dollar calculator lets you enter a sales tax amount and see how each dollar is divided among the seven departments. A budget simulator lets you move money between departments and see the trade-offs, with some departments locked to reflect fixed obligations. A glossary explains the budget terms in plain language.
Every number in GreenLedger comes from a document the city has published. The app has a sources page that lists each of the eight sources with its name, a link, the date we accessed it, and which features use it. If you think a figure is wrong, you can check it against the original.
We want to be clear about what GreenLedger is. It is a student project built from public records. It is not an official City of Cerritos website, and it does not replace the adopted budget. What we hope it does is make the first ten minutes with a city budget less intimidating, so that more people get to the eleventh. GreenLedger is free to use at ecoquest-greenledger.vercel.app.