Free tools for running a ditch company

Who these are for

The two calculators were built for the person who ends up doing this arithmetic anyway — usually the secretary, sometimes the treasurer, sometimes whoever on the board is comfortable with a spreadsheet. If you've ever sat down with a legal pad, a calculator, and last year's assessment notice to figure out what everyone owes this year, these tools do that same math, just faster and without the chance of a transposed digit.

Ditch Finder is for a different moment — usually someone buying, selling, financing, insuring, or researching a property. Statewide it gives a first read on nearby verified structures; in Weld County it leads with a parcel-specific public-record finding, cites the evidence behind it, labels every unsearched record set, and turns the remaining private-record work into a closing order.

None of the three assumes you know anything about corporate finance, accounting, or water law. You type in what you already have — shares, a rate, a due date, or an address — and get back something you can use. Every field is labeled in plain English, and if a term isn't obvious, the guides explain it in more depth.

What each one does

Assessment Calculator

Ditch companies raise money by billing shareholders in proportion to how many shares they own — an assessment. This tool works out the rate per share from either direction: tell it how many shares exist and what rate you want to charge, and it totals the assessment; or tell it how much money you need to raise, and it works out the rate that raises exactly that. It handles more than one share class at once, so a company with, say, separate classes for different canals can total all of them together at once. Paste in your shareholder list and it turns that same math into a printable billing roll and a separate notice for each shareholder. See the full calculator for the details on multi-class shares and the paste-roster flow.

Delinquency Interest Calculator

When an assessment goes unpaid past its due date, many companies' bylaws allow interest to accrue on the unpaid balance. This tool takes a principal amount, a due date, an interest rate, and a grace period, and tells you exactly how much interest has built up as of any date you choose — today, or a date in the past if you're catching up records. It handles both simple interest and compounding, monthly or annual, because bylaws vary on which method a company uses. See the full calculator for more on how grace periods and compounding work.

Ditch Finder

Type a property address and this tool geocodes it, then ranks DitchBook's verified, coordinate-mapped structures by straight-line distance. In Weld County it also retrieves the state parcel polygon, measures reviewed canal geometry inside or near the parcel, connects the result to official WDID and company sources, and generates a printable evidence and search-status packet. Regional point distances are kept separate from parcel evidence. See the full tool for the report and closing-verification workflow.

What is and isn't sent anywhere

The two calculators run entirely as JavaScript inside your own browser. There's no server behind them, no account to create, and nothing you type — a shareholder's name, a dollar amount, a phone number — is transmitted anywhere or stored anywhere outside your own browser tab. Close the tab and the data is gone; reload the page and you start fresh. For something as sensitive as a shareholder roster, the safest place for that data to sit, even briefly, is nowhere but your own screen.

Ditch Finder works differently, because looking up an address requires public services: the address is sent by your browser directly to the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder. For the Weld pilot, the resulting coordinate is sent directly to Colorado's public parcel service. DitchBook has no server of its own and never receives, logs, or stores the address, coordinate, or response — but the lookup does leave your browser, which the calculators' data never does.

Because everything runs locally, both tools also keep working without an internet connection once the page has loaded, and both are built to print cleanly — the billing roll, the individual notices, and the interest breakdown are all formatted to come out looking right on paper, not just on a screen.