Rijksfinancien.nl gives the Dutch a look inside the budget briefcase

Where does your tax money go?

And what figures does the government base its financial policy on? You will find it all on Rijksfinancien.nl, run by the Dutch Ministry of Finance. Together with information specialists Textinfo and design agency 3PO, Indicia is one of the driving forces behind the website that makes government income and spending more transparent than ever.

Anna Alberts chairs the Information Cluster at the Ministry of Finance and leads the Rijksfinancien.nl project. Her department looks after the documentation around the national budget. "You could say we put together the briefcase for Budget Day," Anna says with a wink. "The papers in that briefcase play an important role. They account for the government's spending and income, and they show Dutch citizens where their tax money goes. It matters that we communicate that information as clearly as we can."

No more scattered data

Until a few years ago, that clarity left something to be desired. Anna: "Budget information includes data, reports, regulations and legislation. We used to publish all of that in all kinds of physical publications and on different websites. But to get a complete picture of the situation, you need all of those documents. If you read an article, for example, you also want to know how its content was evaluated later on. And raw data is not attractive or user-friendly in itself. So we wanted to bundle the information better and make it visually clearer, in one central public place."

Complete information and plenty of users

In 2019 Alberts took her wish to information specialist Textinfo, a long-standing partner of the ministry. They brought in Indicia and design agency 3PO. The result? One central website with reliable information about the national budget and public finances: Rijksfinancien.nl. The ministry has published the official budget papers, open data and data visualisations of government spending and income there ever since.

The website is a world of difference compared with the old one, according to Alberts: "If you search for the Ministry of Economic Affairs' budget now, you also get links to the matching figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), evaluations of the policy and visuals that make the data clearer. The site is also used a lot, particularly by members of parliament, journalists, implementing bodies and financial professionals inside government. But citizens can work with the information too, although you do still need some background knowledge of the context."

A Drupal portal connected to many source systems

Indicia built the Rijksfinanciën portal in Drupal and took care of pulling the data out of the many source systems. We prepared the data for use and connected it to 3PO's data visualisations. The back end was built in PHP.

Alberts: "What is great about Indicia's work is that they set the CMS up so we can now do a great deal ourselves. We upload data sets ourselves with Indicia's importers, and because the business rules and formats are built into them, we enter new data virtually without errors. The uploaded data is better structured too, because Indicia organised the databases neatly by year, chapter and article. And with separate acceptance and production environments, we fix any mistakes before we publish data publicly."

Enthusiastic colleagues enjoy their work more

Rijksfinancien.nl gets a lot of positive feedback from the government staff who use it, Alberts says. "Colleagues all find it a pleasure to work with. I notice that users' expectations are growing along with it. Features that were not even possible on the old website are now more or less expected. I also get a lot of questions, requests and ideas in my inbox with suggestions for improvements and extensions. It is good to see the website being used so much and the bar being raised all the time."

Alberts is very positive about the way everyone works together on the platform. "Indicia still runs the helpdesk for fixing bugs and answering questions. They also keep improving the importers, the content database and the Drupal database. Now that we have worked together for a few years, we notice the communication getting smoother all the time. We learn how Indicia likes to work, and they keep building up knowledge of public finance. We really work as one team with Indicia, Textinfo and 3PO. At the ministry we always celebrate success with sausage rolls and champagne, so there was a good reason we sent some to Tilburg at go-live. This is a collective achievement."

"We also want to make the website more accessible for citizens by adding more explanation to the visuals. Rijksfinancien.nl has already become an indispensable part of the publication process, and I am proud of that. We are going to extend that role even further." - Anna Alberts, chair of the Information Cluster, Ministry of Finance