Politician Archive

What I'd like to get in the way of financial reports:

-Detailed breakdown of tax income. "Sales tax has funded the city coffers for XXX this week".

-Receive a mail when someone makes a donation, with the sum involved, so I can thank the guy.

-Detailing of individual Building tax paid by an individual. For the record, it's because Merchants pay less upkeep on houses and therefore pay less house taxes. I know this is offset by the sales tax, but I'd like hard numbers. Convincing your citizens without data isn't always easy.

1. Statement of the issue: why you need financial reports, why what you currently have doesn't work for you.

Currently, there is absolutely no indication of how much money you have coming into your city, other than checking the balance before and after a "tick".
This is a very inaccurate method, especially as taxes may not be deducted from residents until 2 days later.

In order to efficiently plan a city budget, you need to know which taxes are working, and which aren't.
How do I know my shuttle tax is making enough money, or if people aren't using it because the tax is too high ?

2. Specific information you want from the reports, a list of what data you expect to see.

Total income
Total Expenditure

Total Income Breakdown :
Total Income Tax Received
Total Transport Tax Received / number of shuttle users
Total Housing Tax received
Total Sales Tax Receives

In addition, a resident breakdown should be available. I want to know who hasn't paid any Income Tax, who's vendors bring in the most cash etc.
I need a list of what each item in my city costs.

We also need to know when people deposit funds. everyone knows if I remove any, I think it should be known which residents are the generous ones.

A single email would be okay listing all the catagories other posters above have talked about. This woudl allow easy exporting into spreadsheets and the like. But I'd really like to have real-time information available through the management terminal.

Statement of the Issue
Financial reports are critical to the Mayor in balancing the cities books. Without knowing what taxes are earned by income, property, sales, shuttle and donations it is very hard for them to find the ideal balance which I believe would be that the city would run a slight surplus without any donations.

Specific Information
A summary report at the end of the evaluation for the city each week that is automatically emailed to the person who was elected Mayor would help that Mayor plan for the week ahead. The report should include all the expenses by category (As is already displayed from the City management Terminal) and all the income by category (Income, Property, Sales, Shuttle and Donations)

Optional Item
When a player makes a donation exceeding an amount defined by the Mayor, the Mayor would get an email informing him/her of who made the donation and for the amount made.

Mayor Feliz Gizmacher, Founder of Dune Retreat

I think if we got an e-mail halfway through our term on top of the weekly onedetailing how much money is in the treasurey, how much maintenance is required, and how much revenue was collected from the various taxes and donations would be more helpful then getting a mail every time someone buys a gun in town, shuttles, or donates some credits. That way it does most of the stuff above but with less spam. Otherwise I"m out of the loop on taxation, I basically just run off of donations since we don't have a shuttleport yet and not too many vendors.

The more information the better but start with basics and go from there:

Basics, list out the 5 possible revenue streams and the total for the last week

Last update

Income tax 27,500 credits

Sales tax 10,000 credits

Property tax 11,243 credits

Shuttelport fee 5,000 credits

Donations 1,000,000 credits

I think the idea of sliders and what if scenarios are great, but I don't see the devs giving us that. Also shuttleport users with names I think is a bit over the top to ask for.

Something not mentioned but that I would love to see that is similar is a trainer usage report. I keep getting bugged for this trainer and that trainer, but I don't drop on demand. If I could track usage or non-usage I could tweak the trainers I have, same with mission terminals:

Entertainer used 10 times

Brawler used 1 time

Smuggle used 8 times

Generic mission terminal used 140 times

Explorer mission terminal used 17 times

BH terminal used 2 times

I'm already seeing a big split here between those who want it via email so they can keep it, copy it, view it remotely, and those who prefer to have it as a terminal interface report, like the other reports on the city management terminal. So, do we ask for both, along with the ability to turn off email reporting if it is unwanted?

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PsychoticChipmunk wrote:
I think if we got an e-mail halfway through our term on top of the weekly one

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I really like this ... it's not too much more spam I think and can easily be deleted (just sort Email by subject).

It would be a very helpful warning system to cities that are constantly on the boarder of excistance to even out their budget as well as reminding mayors of more wealthy cities to maybe shorten the tax to leave more for their citizens

On the discussion Email or City Hall ... since we already get our Maintenance Email it wouldn't be more spam to include the breakdown of this weeks income into this mail (and optionaly getting a second mail inbetween updates).

But I'd also like to see an up to date income of this week (and this week only since update) of all 5 income channels ... As a dev I'd simply create 5 different bank accounts to which the different income numbers add ... the money would be transfered to the treasury and at the end of an update the last numbers of the 5 income channels would be copied into the Maintenance Mail and set back to zero to begin a new count for the week (well hopefully for a week anyway )

As I use an external Excel sheet anyway to catalogue both the money in the treasury as well as the money on hand (due to vendor donations) that is needed to pay for structures and Events (can't do that with only 50k/day) this would suit me fine. You can save the data via the emails and always have a good oversight of how the seperate taxes are coming allong this week ...

Oh ... and I'd like this to go into the mayor-only tree of the city terminal menu. MAybe with the later possability to give seperate citizens the power to access these menus (simulare to the PA-Management) enabling a different citizen to play a finance minister ... but getting slightly off topic here

This is an issue that we can be very clear on. I think we can easily generate a list of report items we would all like to see from these responses, and I will get that out as soon as I can for your approval. Keep discussing. Our goal for submitting all of this to the devs is Friday, so we have a couple days for discussion still.

1. It is difficult to accomodate future planning when you do not know how much money you are getting from each of the tax types. We already know how many people we have, so it is easy to calculate how much money you get from the 'income' tax. However, it is not so easy to tell how much you are getting from property tax (you know the number of buildings but you don't now how much each is being charged), or from sales or from the use of the shuttleport.


2. The City Budget therefore needs to show:




• Income from donations for that week.


• Shuttleport usage.


• Income from the shuttleport fees.


• Number of sales.


• Amount of money from sales tax.


• Amount of money from property tax. Possibly seperated by class (Houses, Tents, Factories, Harvestors, Other).

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BrianAlt wrote:

City Hall Terminal! We get enough email as it is. Too easy to delete. And the developers would probably end up sending us an email everytime an event happened.

• Player A just donated 100,000c


• Vendor C just sold a CDEF Pistol and paid a sales tax of 10c


• Player B just paid his taxes of 1000c


• Player D House just paid maintenence of 100c

...

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I would like that as an OPTION..

We currently employ /mailsave to save all Vendor and city messages and we have a MySQL database that is keeping track of our city maintenance, citizens, vendor sales etc.. It's been wonderful and if we could get more detail who needs dev reports we can write our own.

But for those that want it I think they should have an option to supress some if not all the E-mail coming from the city. To each his own and I think 5 bytes per city will not crash the database.

1. Statement of the Issue: No idea what income the city is generating or a breakdown of where it is coming from.

2. Proposed Solution: Well I must say I'm in agreement with what a majority of the others have posted already. A detailed breakdown (sales tax, flat tax, shuttle, and property tax) of the income is vital in determining how to best manage city taxes and hopefully easing the tax rate of citizens as you see trends in increased sales and travel develope. As to how it should be delivered, I'm for email format as it allows the option to forward this information on to key members of your staff while not leaving your city'susiness open to anyone accessing the city terminal. Lastly, an email sent every time someone donates to the treasury over say 5,000 would be helpful in the fact that you can see who is contributing what to the city over and above their normal taxes. This would give the mayor the oppurtunity to at least send out a thank you mail or possibly for the higher donators, place a nice fountain outside their residence or something to recognize their efforts to maintain the city.

Mayor Tinee

Bloodfin-Naboo-Lianorm Point