A reporter covering city government wants to know which departments have handed out the largest raises recently, and whether they cluster around specific titles or individuals. Answering that from the raw OpenDataPhilly payroll export means downloading hundreds of thousands of rows and building the comparison from scratch.
The reporter opens CompensationAtlas's department view, which surfaces the biggest raises for a given department alongside overtime and leadership pay trends, already aggregated.
The rollup shows a cluster of large raises tied to a single title within one department over the last two budget cycles — a pattern that's invisible in a single year's snapshot, but obvious once the years are lined up.
One raise is an anecdote. The same title getting the department's largest raise three years running is a pattern worth asking about.
Every figure in the rollup traces back to the live OpenDataPhilly payroll feed, so the reporter can cite the underlying public record directly rather than an internal calculation.
Journalists and data reporters covering city government, and watchdog groups building longitudinal pay-trend stories rather than single-year snapshots.