Morgantown unveils in-house financial transparency portal and checkbook

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The city showed a new financial transparency portal at its March 31 workshop, saying the tool will make monthly department- and fund-level spending and cash-on-hand visible to the public.

John Ferguson, the city's finance director, demonstrated the portal on morgantownwv.gov and described why staff opted to build an in-house system: the city's previous ERP and the vendor's integration formats broke automated feeds, and the vendor's estimated one-time rework was approximately $43,000 on top of existing portal fees of roughly $38,000. Ferguson credited Marvin Davis (in-house) with creating the new portal and said the city will upload audited FY25 information when the audit is complete and maintain monthly updates thereafter.

Features shown include a transparency "checkbook" (the state auditor's tool) and the city's new dashboard where users can filter by fiscal year, month, fund and department, view month-to-month expenditure charts and see cash-on-hand and restricted-cash balances. Ferguson demonstrated fund views showing the general fund's January 2026 expenditures and a February 2026 decline, and he said the portal will not yet show ultra-detailed line items (for example office-supply line-level purchases) until staff chooses to enable deeper drill-downs.

Council members praised the access and suggested the city use the portal as a communication tool to show constituents what MSF (municipal service fee) revenue pays for and to highlight specific paving or parks investments tied to the user fee. Ferguson said the portal currently covers Morgantown reporting and that separate entities such as the parking authority maintain their own reporting unless the city chooses to ingest that data in the future.

The council offered no formal action; staff said the portal is work in progress and will expand functionality on request.