Budget

The San Francisco Controller's Office maintains a database of budgetary data that appears in summarized form in each Annual Appropriation Ordinance (AAO). This data is presented on the Budget report hosted at http://openbook.sfgov.org, and is also available in this dataset in CSV format. New data is added on an annual basis when the AAO is published for each new fiscal year. Data is available from fiscal year 2010 forward.

The City and County of San Francisco's budget is a two-year plan for how the City government will spend money with available resources. In the budget process, a budget is proposed by the Mayor, and then modified and approved by the Board of Supervisors as the Appropriation Ordinance. Each year, the City will update the Budget for the upcoming fiscal year and also set a budget for the subsequent fiscal year, which will be updated and approved in the following year. Enterprise departments do not submit a budget for the second year of the two year budget; rather, estimates of enterprise department budgets in the second year of the budget are incorporated into high-level spending and revenue figures. 

This dataset and the Appropriation Ordinance departmental views answer the question "How much does each department spend?". To show how much is spent by departments from the General Fund we make the following adjustments to the regular revenues and fund balance & reserves:

            + Transfers from one department to another (leaving out transfers within the same department)
            + Recoveries from one department to another (leaving out recoveries within the same department)
            - GF spent in other funds (this is deducted from GF Sources and added to the other fund's Sources)

This is the gross total. By removing the transfers and recoveries that go from one department to the another we see the same net total that is in the Appropriation Ordinance Consolidated Schedule of Sources and Uses. 

Note that the amount added for transfers into the General Fund that move from one department to another is different than the amount deducted to eliminate the double counting caused by transfers. 

Transfer Adjustments:
To meet accounting needs, money can be moved from one fund or department to another. For example, Public Works provides building maintenance services for the Fire Department for which the Fire Department pays Public Works.

To solve this double counting problem, this dataset shows a reduction of $100,000 called Transfer Adjustments (Citywide) to the budgeted spending & revenue for the department providing the service. This lets the dataset display both the gross total of activity for both departments and the net total use of City and County revenues.

In the example above, the money is moving both between departments, from Fire to Public Works, and between funds, from General Fund Operating to General Fund Works Orders/Overhead.

Transfer Adjustments (Citywide):
-Transfer Adjustments (Citywide) are used when money is moved from one department to another. These are deducted from the gross total to create the net total.
-Transfer Adjustments are included in the gross total when they are within the same department. A separate sub-object is used to distinguish departmental Transfer Adjustments from Transfer Adjustments (Citywide).
-Transfer Adjustments (Citywide) may differ from transfer adjustment  lines in other public reports as a result of different approaches used to report transfers; however, the net total will remain the same across this dataset, the Mayor's Budget Book, and the Appropriations Ordinance, with limited exceptions due to error corrections and different methodologies used to present net totals. For more information, contact us.

An example of a Transfer Adjustment within a department would be Public Works overhead allocations. Overhead costs cannot easily be isolated to a direct service or unit and so are allocated across those units using accepted accounting methods. Central m

Tags: budget, open-book, openbook, sfopenbook
Organization: City of San Francisco