Today the Rhode Island Treasury opened a web site that reports on all Treasury department expenses. Treasurer Capria calls it the Treasury's Online Checkbook. In the opening video he says that the software has been designed for use by any of the state's departments. Hopefully it can be used by town and school administrations too.
Update: The Treasurer's "realtime" claim about the data is a little disingenuous. As the FAQ says "Data is extracted from RIFANS once weekly, and the website is updated to reflect cumulative figures." Weekly is realtime if your clock ticks only by weeks.
Also, as far as I can tell, you can not get the raw data. Governments, as a general rule, should first provide the data and secondly provide tools to use the data. If you make the data available then most people that want to use the data can use the tools they already have (such as Excel, Access, FileMaker, Matlab, SAS, etc).
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