How it works

What does the City checkbook show, and what does it leave out?

The Controller's Checkbook L.A. data lists payments the City has made, with payee, department, fund and purchase order; LA Receipts' spending pages narrow it to payments to outside vendors from the City's governmental funds, so payroll, benefits, debt, transfers to other governments and the self-funded departments are left out.

Checked against official sources · As of Oct 1, 2026

What the Controller publishes

The Controller, the City's auditor and general accountant, publishes the City's payments as Checkbook L.A. Data, the dataset behind the Controller's Checkbook L.A. application. Each row is a payment, with the payee's name, the department, fund and account charged, an expenditure type, the transaction date and amount, and, where there is one, the purchase order and invoice number. The Controller lists the dataset's refresh rate as monthly.

A payment is not a contract. A row shows money paid on a date against a purchase order, the City's authorization to pay a vendor, not what the contract behind it is worth.

What LA Receipts counts as spending

The raw checkbook mixes payments to outside businesses with money the City moves for other reasons. The spending and vendor pages keep payments to outside vendors for goods and services and leave out:

  • Water and Power, Airports and Harbor, whose boards control their own funds separately from the General City Budget;
  • pension custody and other fiduciary funds;
  • payroll, health and other employee-benefit payments, including benefit insurers;
  • debt service, deposits and taxes the City itself pays;
  • contributions and transfers to other agencies, and payments to other governments;
  • payments the Controller has not assigned an expenditure type.

The exact rules are in the “What is counted” note on the spending page. What remains is roughly a fifth of the raw checkbook. The contracts page uses a slightly different scope: it groups payments by purchase order, includes contributions the City pays agencies such as LAHSA under contract, and leaves out any order with a lawsuit or claim payout on it.

What the checkbook cannot tell you

  • The budget. Payments are cash out the door. Budgets also count money committed but not yet paid, and the two are organized by different fiscal-year rules (see why budget and spending numbers differ).
  • Salaries. City employees' pay is in the Controller's payroll data, shown on the payroll page. In the FY2026-27 adopted budget, salaries are the largest category of appropriations for budgetary departments (Exhibit A).
  • What was delivered. A payment records that an invoice was paid, not whether the work was done well. That is the work of the Controller's audits of departments and programs.
  • The latest weeks. Because the data is refreshed monthly, recent payments may not have posted yet. Every spending page shows the date of the newest payment it has.

Sources

  1. Office of the Controller, Checkbook L.A. Data (dataset and column definitions). Checked Oct 1, 2026.
  2. Los Angeles City Charter, Secs. 260–261: the Controller as auditor and general accountant. Checked Oct 1, 2026.
  3. Los Angeles City Charter, Secs. 601–604: proprietary departments' purposes, assets and control of funds. Checked Oct 1, 2026.
  4. Office of the Controller, City of Los Angeles Adopted Budget, Fiscal Year 2026-27 (Budget Statement, Financial Policies, Fund Structure, Budget Calendar, Exhibits B and C). Checked Oct 1, 2026.

The Charter and City codes are published by American Legal Publishing; its site notes that recently enacted legislation can take up to three months to appear. This note describes how things work as of Oct 1, 2026 and does not assess any official or policy.