Public finance analytics · Polco
Balancing Act
Interactive budget-simulation tool that lets residents rebalance a government's budget and shows officials where priorities diverge.
Balancing Act is a resident-facing budget simulator: a government publishes its actual revenue and expense line items, and residents move sliders to raise or cut spending and taxes, immediately seeing whether their choices balance the budget. Rather than replacing the internal budgeting and reporting systems that products like ClearGov or Euna Budget provide, it is a participatory-engagement layer that agencies run alongside those systems during public budget hearings, using the aggregated resident input to show elected officials where public priorities align or diverge from proposed budgets. It was acquired by Polco, a community-engagement and survey platform for local government, and is now sold together with Polco's broader resident-feedback and benchmarking tools. It is cloud-hosted SaaS with no self-hosted option.
At a glance
| Vendor | Polco |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Quote only |
| Free tier | No |
| Deployment | Cloud |
| Open source | No |
| Best for | Local governments that want structured public input on trade-offs during budget hearings, alongside their core budgeting system. |
Pricing
Sold as an agency subscription, typically alongside Polco's engagement platform; pricing is not published.
Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.
Features
- Interactive resident budget simulator with live rebalancing
- Line-item revenue and expense modelling
- Aggregated resident-priority reporting for elected officials
- Federal, state and local budget simulation templates
- Integration with Polco's community survey and benchmarking tools
- Public budget-hearing engagement workflows
Integrations
Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026