This text shows a real case of how the Open Data Editor (ODE) impacted the workflow of an organisation working to serve the public good.

A training course offered by PARI for trainers working in municipal administrations

Organisation: Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) **Location: **Johannesburg, South Africa 🇿🇦 **Knowledge Area: **Public Administration **Type of Data: **Municipal Financial Data, Budgets, Expenditure

In South Africa, the quality of municipal financial data is a cornerstone of effective governance, impacting everything from service delivery to national policy. The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) works at this critical intersection, analysing complex municipal datasets to inform high-stakes policy interventions and reviews. For their team, data accuracy is a technical requirement and a prerequisite for accountability. The Open Data Editor (ODE) became an essential tool in their workflow, transforming a traditionally manual and error-prone data validation process into a streamlined, reliable system.

The Challenge

PARI’s Local Government Unit handles a vast array of complex municipal data, including:

• Section 71 Financial Data: Tracking municipal budgets, adjustments, and audited outcomes.
• Municipal Tariffs: Data on rates for services like water, electricity, and sanitation.
• Capital Budgets and Debtors Analysis: Information on infrastructure projects and municipal finances.

Before ODE, the process for validating this data was overwhelmingly manual. Analysts would download PDF and Excel submissions and spend days using conditional formatting and manual checks to identify errors like empty cells, incorrect naming, and misaligned columns.

This manual method was slow and also prone to human error, with mistakes inevitably slipping through. This cumbersome process created a bottleneck for PARI’s crucial work, which includes supporting the City of Johannesburg with budget analysis and leading a national review of the local government fiscal framework.

Dataset: City of Johannesburg S71 financial records Dataset: Tariffs for Metropolitan Municipalities

The Solution

PARI integrated the Open Data Editor directly into their core projects. They used ODE to ingest and validate the complex, multi-sheet Excel files commonly used in municipal reporting.

Key features that addressed their challenges were:

• Automated Error Flagging: ODE automatically profiled the data, instantly highlighting empty cells, type mismatches, and structural inconsistencies that would take days to find manually. This shifted their role from manual detectives to efficient data supervisors.
• Multi-Sheet Support: After initial challenges, the development of multi-sheet support was a breakthrough, allowing PARI to validate the intricate, multi-tab workbooks standard in municipal reporting within a single interface.
• AI-Powered Assistance: Despite a slow start, the AI feature evolved into a valuable asset. The offline LLM feature helped identify issues and suggest corrections, further reducing the manual workload.
• Data Structuring: ODE helped PARI restructure messy datasets into a clean, consistent format, making them “more presentable” and ready for reliable analysis. Examples of errors detected by ODE in a municipal datasets: blank cells and wrong formats.

The Results

The adoption of ODE has had a tangible impact on PARI’s efficiency and the robustness of their policy work.

• Dramatic Time Savings: Processes that took up to three days manually are now completed in a fraction of the time, thanks to automated error detection.
• Improved Data Credibility: ODE ensures the data underpinning PARI’s analyses and recommendations is trustworthy.
• Reduced Manual Workload: The automation of routine validation has freed up the team to focus on higher-level analysis and strategic thinking.
• A Model for National Data Quality: PARI sees ODE’s potential to improve the entire ecosystem of public financial data, especially if municipalities themselves used ODE to quality-check their data before submission to bodies like the National Treasury. The PARI team engages in an internal seminar to discuss AI’s use in research

Quote

Jugal Mahabir, Local Government Programme Lead

“The ODE tool was used for all of these projects to assist. The National Treasury here in South Africa does it manually. It’s all just manual checking and it used to take hours.”

About the Open Data Editor

The Open Data Editor (ODE) is Open Knowledge’s open source desktop application for nonprofits, data journalists, activists, and public servants, aiming at helping them detect errors in their datasets. It’s a free, open-source tool designed for people working with tabular data (Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) who don’t know how to code or don’t have the programming skills to automatise the data exploration process.

Simple, lightweight, privacy-friendly, and built for real-world challenges like offline work and low-resource settings, ODE is part of Open Knowledge’s initiative The Tech We Want — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used. In October 2025, ODE was recognised as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

And there’s more! ODE comes with a free online course that can help you improve the quality of your datasets, therefore making your life/work easier.

↪ Take the course: Learn how to use ODE

All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.

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