Annual Financial Data

Each year, California's kindergarten through grade twelve (K–12) school districts, county offices of education, charter schools, and joint powers agencies, all commonly known as local educational agencies (LEAs), submit annual financial reports to the California Department of Education (CDE). The Financial Accountability and Information Services (FAIS) Office, within the CDE, is responsible for annually collecting, reviewing, and preparing these financial data for dissemination.

In 1997, a Standardized Account Code Structure (SACS) was developed and implemented by LEAs over the next seven years. At the same time, the SACS Financial Reporting Software was developed to accommodate SACS accounting. The use of SACS and the SACS Financial Reporting Software helps facilitate consistency among LEAs in recording and reporting financial information.

Beginning with fiscal year 2003–04, charter school financial reporting was required by Education Code sections 1628 and 42100 (as amended by Assembly Bill 1994, Chapter 1058, Statutes of 2002). The Charter School Alternative Form is an option available for charter schools to prepare their unaudited actual financial reports without using SACS and the SACS Financial Reporting Software.

If you would like to be notified when these data sets are available for a future year, please send a blank message to join-school-district-financial-data@mlist.cde.ca.gov to subscribe to our mailing list.

Also, selected information from these data sets is available at the Ed-Data website .

SACS and Charter School Alternative Form Unaudited Actual Data Sets

The following databases contain unaudited actuals financial data for county offices of education, school districts, joint powers agencies, and charter schools. Data for charter schools that submitted year-end unaudited actuals data in the SACS format, separately or with their authorizing LEA, are included in the SACS data files. Data for charter schools that submitted unaudited actuals data using the Charter School Alternative Form are included in the Alternative Form Data files. Please refer to the download instructions web page for information on how to download executable (EXE) files.

Please be sure to read the readme.txt file associated with the file type and year you are downloading. They contain detailed information about that year's data. Due to the size of the files, these data sets are processed using the Microsoft Access database application.

For detailed field descriptions to the SACS Unaudited Actual and charter school Alternative Form Unaudited Actual data sets, please refer to the field descriptions web page.

LEA J-200 Financial Data

During transition to SACS reporting, the J-200 Unaudited Actual Financial Reports continued to be used by some LEAs to report their balance sheet accounts, revenues by sources, and expenditures by types. Gradually, more and more LEAs reported using SACS. In 2003–04, for the first time all LEAs reported in SACS. For fiscal year 2003–04, the CDE converted the SACS data into the old J-200 format for comparison purposes. However, beginning with fiscal year 2004–05 data, SACS data are no longer converted to the J-200 format and only the SACS format is available.

J-200 Unaudited Actual Financial Data

All J-200 LEA submissions to CDE from fiscal year 1995–96 through 2002–03 are available in the following self-extracting file. Also included are all SACS submissions for 2003–04 converted to the J-200 format.