Numbers not adding up between financial summaries and receipts

fecgov / FEC

A general discussion forum for FEC.gov. This is the best place to submit general feedback.

https://www.fec.gov

Other

226 stars 55 forks source link

Numbers not adding up between financial summaries and receipts #11573

Open fec-issues-bot opened 2 years ago

fec-issues-bot commented 2 years ago

What were you trying to do and how can we improve it?

I'm trying to see why numbers don't add up. When looking at the total receipts for a Congressman, figures are displayed in "financial summary". however, when you download the "receipts and then add them up in Excel, they don;t add up.

General feedback?

Tell us about yourself

Details

URL: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?committee_id=C00729954&two_year_transaction_period=2022&data_type=processed
User Agent: Amazon CloudFront

JonellaCulmer commented 2 years ago

@PaulClark2 Does this sound like an itemized vs. unitemized issue to you?

justinpru commented 2 years ago

@JonellaCulmer Hello. The image shows a total of $1,590,909.43 for receipts, however, when you export this file to Excel and sum up the receipts, the total becomes $2,181,951.17. There is a huge difference here. Any insight into this is appreciated. Thank you. Justin

PaulClark2 commented 2 years ago

@justinpru Thank you for contacting the FEC. The file you exported includes memo items. These transactions are included to help clarify the source and/or destination of a contribution. They should not be included in your sums. You can identify memo items by looking at Column AG, memo_code. If there is an "X" in the row, you should excluded that transaction from your total.

After you sum the non-memo transactions, you will need to add the unitemzied amount, $99,080.93, from the financial summary section of the committee's profile page to your total.

You will find that the total displayed in the financial summary section of the committee's profile page is $151.16 more than the sum of the non-memo transactions. The difference can be found in the "offsets to operating expenditures." cc:: @JonellaCulmer

justinpru commented 2 years ago

@PaulClark2

I thank you very much for the quick response and for solving the mystery. You also went above and beyond by letting me know not only to exclude the memos, add the unitemized amount, and then consider the "offsets", Truly great.

Again, I thank you and I thank @JonellaCulmer for this assistance.

Justin