The night before a budget hearing usually looks the same in every council and legislative office: a staffer, a stack of downloaded payroll files, and a spreadsheet that won't quite reconcile. By the time the numbers are clean, there's no time left to think about the questions. ALKARTIS flips that order.
Department budgets and city payroll are public. The obstacle has never been getting the records; it's turning them into a department-level picture you can reason about. Each quarter arrives as its own file. Following a department across years, separating base salary from overtime, or comparing this cycle to the last one means hours of manual cleanup before you can ask a single useful question. That work is necessary, tedious, and easy to get subtly wrong — which is the worst outcome when you're about to put a number on the record.
CompensationAtlas holds Philadelphia city payroll — every employee's title, department, salary, and actual pay, quarter by quarter since 2016 — already connected and searchable. For hearing prep, that means you can pull a department rollup in minutes instead of days:
A vague concern gets a talking point in response. A specific, sourced number gets an answer — and that's the difference between performing oversight and doing it.
The goal of prep isn't to arrive with more paper. It's to arrive with questions a witness actually has to answer. When you can see that a department's overtime has climbed three cycles running, or that headcount is flat while total compensation isn't, you stop asking "how's the budget?" and start asking "why has overtime in this unit grown by this much since the last cycle — and what's the plan?" Specific, sourced questions are harder to deflect. That's the entire value of walking in prepared.
It also changes the room's dynamic. A witness who expects general questions prepares general answers; a witness who is asked about a specific line, with a specific number, has to engage with the substance. Preparation of this kind is quietly the most effective oversight tool an office has, and until now it has been rationed by how much time a staffer could spare for spreadsheet work.
Consider a council office preparing to question a department at a budget hearing. Instead of assigning a staffer two days to reconcile payroll exports, the office pulls the department's compensation history in CompensationAtlas, notes where overtime diverges from base rates, and compares the current cycle against prior years — in an afternoon. The remaining time goes where it should: into deciding which three numbers to lead with and how to frame the follow-ups. The prep becomes about judgment, not data janitorial work.
Anything you put on the record in a hearing has to survive a pushback. That's why every figure in CompensationAtlas traces back to the city's own published payroll record. When you cite a department's overtime total or headcount, you're not defending an estimate you built overnight — you're pointing to the underlying public record. ALKARTIS is designed around exactly this: fragmented records turned into intelligence that stays explainable all the way back to the source.
Today, hearing prep on ALKARTIS draws on live Philadelphia records — payroll and overtime through CompensationAtlas, plus connected records like L&I permits, valuations, and code violations where they're relevant to an oversight topic. City contracts and vendor payments will add a spending dimension through ContractSignal, but that's an in-development product and its data source isn't connected yet, so we don't count it in what you can pull now.
ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia, so today's hearing prep is built on Philadelphia city records. We're expanding city by city, and additional jurisdictions will come online over time. If your office needs bulk or programmatic access to support recurring hearing cycles, API access is part of the Enterprise tier — talk to our team.
For any Philadelphia city department, CompensationAtlas gives you headcount, titles, total compensation, and the gap between listed salary rates and actual pay after overtime — quarter by quarter since 2016. That lets you build a department-level picture and spot the trend lines before you write a single question.
The payroll records are already ingested, connected, and searchable, so you skip the download-clean-reconcile cycle that normally eats days. Instead of assembling the numbers, you spend your time deciding what to ask about them.
Yes. Every figure in CompensationAtlas traces back to the city's own published payroll record, so when you cite a department's overtime total or headcount in a hearing, you can point to the source it came from rather than defending an estimate.
Today the live coverage is payroll — salaries and overtime — through CompensationAtlas, plus other connected Philadelphia records like permits, valuations, and violations. City contracts and vendor payments are coming through ContractSignal, an in-development product, and are not connected yet.
For now, yes. ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia, so hearing prep today draws on Philadelphia city records. We are expanding city by city, and more jurisdictions will come online over time.
See how CompensationAtlas turns Philadelphia payroll into department rollups and overtime trends you can question a witness on — and cite with confidence.