Open The Books Reviews

OpenTheBooks offers terrific information on Government salaries and project spending on federal and state levels. Current information is limited to 19 states but hopefully other states will feel the pressure to open up their books. Kudos!

Just installed OpenTheBooks at my son‘s recommendation and it will not open on my iPhone 11 max. He has an older iPhone 6s Plus and it works fine on his device. I made sure my iOS is on the latest version, I deleted OpenTheBooks , performed a hard restart, reinstalled, still no go. It appears to be related to location services.

OpenTheBooks provides good information at the federal level, but fails to provide anything at the lower level. It could also use an update to the look and feel of it.

OpenTheBooks was updated 2 years ago... needs updating.

As another reviewer noted, maybe things are good at the federal level but sooooo much is missing at the state level and it’s info that is definitely available online. I hoped this would be a nice, one-stop shop, but it falls far short.

Great info, but somehow I glitched it and the state level checkbook won’t work and Idaho isn’t in the selection list for some reason.

Pages don’t fit phone size.
App pages freeze.
Needs to be populated

It’s like children are programming OpenTheBooks. Please update this ASAP...

Freezes in the middle of changing screens. When looking up an individual name, asks for a state. Looks like no updates or fixes of bugs in 3 years. Unheard of these days of such rapid change.

OpenTheBooks was great 3 years ago but state level info hasn’t been updated since 2018. It needs to be updated annually. I’d bet if it was, people would be willing to pay for it.

Was looking forward to OpenTheBooks after hearing Andrew Andrzejewski speaking at Hillsdale. Very buggy and practically useless. An organization which criticizes government for wasteful incompetence should think twice before releasing an app like this.

OpenTheBooks is having issues loading content after navigating through the different features.

I couldn’t pull anything up on OpenTheBooks . The page was showing half folded where you couldn’t see anything on OpenTheBooks .

Tried it out and found problems with OpenTheBooks . Too hard to use AND the pages would half flip and become unreadable and stuck in place.

Could not do anything at all on OpenTheBooks (iPhone 11). OpenTheBooks keeps freezing up on opening a page with no way of starting over without restarting phone. Great idea, junk app.

App doesn’t even work on iOS. Can’t lookup any meaningful data. Failure to be able to filter by organization makes OpenTheBooks useless IMO.

It jams up the moment I open the local section.
Please fix and update.
AMAZING IDEA.

The page is stuck folded in half.

Need an update?

Freezes for local area -the only part I care about. Bummer

Just loaded on my iPhone XR and it freezes with page halfway folded. Am about to remove. Nice idea terrible execution.

Great idea. Good info.
But OpenTheBooks freezes up all the time on my iPhone 8. OS is up to date.
Could it be the VPN?
Please look into the.

Tried viewing Federal data. All it shows is pages that can't be flipped. No explanation, instruction or in-app guide

OpenTheBooks is extremely temperamental and names can’t be found. No update since 2015....is OpenTheBooks dead?

Terrible. Can't search by name. Inaccurate salaries. Constant crashes.

This is by far the sloppiest and most poorly designed app in OpenTheBooks Store.

No results for anything. Good job Coburn. As usual.

For years, government and teacher salaries have been kept secret from the ones who pay them. And both have proven that increased salaries to do mean better results. In fact, just the opposite. With OpenTheBooks, I can show my liberal friends that pouring more money down a sink hole is not the answer and the fair market value of their pay is highly inflated. I sent OpenTheBooks to dozens of people to get the message out about the waste of our taxes.

It was entertaining for 3 min but the constant scrolling through the same names with multiple entries seems a bit much. I'm not sure why they couldn't consolidate 1 user name and retain all data under that entry, rather than list the same person 6 times because they have received subsidies over the last X years or for different reasons. The historical data should be tied to that name in my opinion and displayed in a simple manner for user. Lazy really on developer to not do that on back end before pushing it out. Uninstalling.

I am so happy that I can now identify the reason we are having a fiscal problem in Illinois. I can't believe how much our teachers are getting. I wouldn't mind if our kids were learning at a higher level but just look at the statistics in Chicago. Thanks for enlightening us.

Go figure it takes a private enterprise to facilitate gov transparency. Nice job! If anyone cares about how your money is spent by identifying what who when. Only critique (which no way around) is timeliness. Data is prob limited to official reporting which is likely yr+ old.

Thank you for making such a great app. One small problem is that the results suggest that Skokie is closer to Vernon Hills than Lincolnshire. The latter is next door to Vernon Hills, the former is ~15 miles away. Other than this minor issue, this application is wonderful.

I would like to see a calculation for the present value of an annuity required to match the pension promised to these folks. There is not a benefit for the students from all this money on teachers benefits so something has to give. The teachers unions should be really happy about this!