Trillions of dollars flow from governments and organizations across the globe every single year, and the money can be nearly impossible to accurately track.

The Development Finance Observatory, which launches on Wednesday, gives users the ability to access tons of disparate data sources and make analyses using plain language.

For instance, you might want to compare the debt paid by one country to another over the past 15 years, adjusted for inflation—an analysis that was possible before, but could require significant time and resources.

The project is an initiative from One Data, part of the nonprofit One Campaign, with support from Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation’s public charity, RF Catalytic Capital. It was built on Google’s Data Commons.

The tool’s real magic, says David McNair, managing director at One Data, is the ability to pull data into it from a host of sources and get an idea of where money is going, and where it may be getting lost in the mix.

“Finance flows are a very fragmented world,” he says, adding that if someone wants to analyze GDP numbers, they may get the data from the International Monetary Fund, but if they want inflation data, they may need to get it from somewhere else.

“The platform standardizes it all in a knowledge graph; you can ask a question and get an answer,” he adds. “If you’re a finance minister, a funder in the U.S., or a journalist, you can find where the money is going quickly.”

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