How to Build Dais-Ready Reports

Every staff report, ordinance, or council memo starts one of two ways in Madison. Know your topic already? Start in the workflow, let Madison pull your sources and draft, then refine in the canvas.

Still working out your recommendation? Start in a research thread, talk it through with Madison, then turn that thread into a report. Either path lands in the same place: an editable draft in the canvas, built from your data and ready for your final touches before council. Less time assembling. More time on the judgment calls only you can make.

The canvas isn't a static export. Highlight any line and type your edit, or use built-in AI commands to shorten, elaborate, formalize, or turn text into bullets, without leaving the document. Madison gets you to roughly 80% of a finished draft. The other 20%, your judgment and the details only your team knows, stays yours. Bonus: Exporting PowerPoint doesn't just make slides. It hands you a full talk track, so even prepping an internal presentation gets faster.

Sometimes you don't start with a topic, you start with a question, like what your community thinks about a contentious project. Work it out in a research thread: ask for follow-ups, test a shorter timeline, pull in past board action. When you're ready, hit "make a report" and choose which responses to include. Madison turns that back-and-forth into a polished recommendation for council, citations and all. The thinking you already did doesn't get redone, but rather it is used in your template for a final product.

Citations tell you where an answer came from. The new quality evaluator tells you how much to trust it. Madison checks every response on three fronts: 1) How relevant the sources are; 2) How thoroughly the topic is covered, and 3) How internally consistent the information is. A yellow or red flag isn't a failure; it's a prompt to ask Madison for more, the same way you'd double-check a colleague's work.

Every RFP doesn't have to start from a blank page. Madison pulled a city's last landscaping contracts, flagged that a request for bid fit their policy better than an RFP, and suggested a spending threshold based on real numbers. It even surfaced the staff who worked the last contract and caught a required prevailing-wage note, no digging through a shared drive required. Your institutional history becomes a running head start on every new solicitation.

A fifty-page solicitation has a lot of places for something to slip: a missing RFB number, language that drifted from your approved template, a mismatched email domain. Madison's compliance report checks completeness, policy thresholds, and template adherence, then hands you a clear pass or fail on each. It's another set of eyes on the document before it goes out, catching inconsistencies that are easy to miss but costly if they reach council or a bidder.