Standard ways for presenting and storing financial databases?
We’ve started getting a lot of financial databases (and other sorts of data sets) from government offices, usually in Excel format but sometimes just printed out.
For city budgets, salaries, etc. and other financial data, is there a standard format for storing this? We hope to make these data sets broadly available and would love it if we could find a format that would easily let people compare similar data city-to-city or year-to-year, but I wanted to see if there was some generally accepted format or tips before reinventing the wheel.
1 Answer
Instead of creating your own format, I'd try to use whatever structure is already used by a (larger) government agency. For example, if you're looking at municipal budgets, I'd look for a state agency that collects all this info in a common format.
For salary data, I'd do the same--is there a state pension board that collects everyone's salary? Better to get data from them than from each agency/jurisdiction separately.
Using an existing format helps defend against accusations that you're manipulating the numbers to make an agency look bad. It's really helpful to be able to say that the alarming shortfall estimates come from a state report.
You can often follow this stuff up to the national level, albeit with less specificity and a greater time lag. See census estimates of government spending, or the NCES' common core of data (about school spending). For bigger agencies check out the single audit clearinghouse.
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