Technical Specifications for Electronic Filing of Campaign Expense Reports

Changes from Previous Specifications

There have been several changes to the technical specifications for electronic filing of campaign expense reports. There have been changes to the layout for all five data files. These changes were necessitated by the changes to the paper campaign expense reporting form. Highlights of the changes are listed below: In all five files, (filer.txt, contrib.txt, expense.txt, debt.txt and receipt.txt) the year has been added. >In the filer.txt file, the separate fields for candidate name (last, first, middle and suffix) have been removed. If the report is filed by a candidate, the name should be concatenated into the filer name field. In the filer.txt file, the treasurer name, address and phone number has been removed. The only address that is to be provided now is the address from the expense report cover sheet. In the filer.txt file, the office codes have changed from numeric to more intuitive 3-letter codes. Refer to the office code table below. In the filer.txt file, the party codes have been changed from numeric to more intuitive 3-letter codes. Refer to the party code table below. In the contrib.txt file , a new section code field has been added. This is to identify which section of the report the contribution record is to appear. In the contrib.txt file, the contributing committee number has been removed. In the contrib.txt file, there are now three separate date and amount fields to indicate if a particular contributor has given multiple contributions to the filer during the reporting period. In the contrib.txt file, the payment method has been removed. In the expense.txt file , the recipient identification number has been removed. In the expense.txt file, the expenditure code has been removed. In county code table , Forest county should be number 27, and Franklin county should be number 28. This is to correct an oversight in the original specifications.

The Department will support these new specifications immediately. It is our hope that the certified vendors will have their applications modified, and distributed to their customers by December 31, 1999. The Department will stop supporting the original specifications at some point past that date.

General Requirements for All Files

All data files provided to the Department of State must be ASCII text files. All data files must be comma (,) delimited; that is, a comma must separate all fields in the file. All data files must be text qualified with double quotation marks ("); that is, any field defined as alphanumeric must be enclosed by double quotation marks. A sample of this type of file is provided below:

1234,"Mary Jones",150.00,"123 East Main Street","Anytown","PA","171021234"

5678,"William A. Smith",,"123 West Main Street","Anytown","PA",""

In this sample, there are seven fields. The first field is a numeric field, followed by an alphanumeric name field, a numeric dollar amount field, an alphanumeric address field, and alphanumeric city field, an alphanumeric state code field and finally, an alphanumeric zip code field. In the case where no value is available for a numeric field, only a comma should be placed in the file. For alphanumeric fields that are not available, a set of empty double quotation marks should be placed in the file. These cases are both illustrated in the second record above. 

Note: This sample is for illustration purposes only.

Files to Be Provided

There are five basic types of information that are to be data entered: basic filer information, contributions, other receipts, expenditures and debts. This information will be provided to the Department of State in five files: filer.txt, contrib.txt, receipt.txt, expense.txt and debt.txt, respectively.

Filer.txt will contain the information about each filer. This information is found primarily on the first page of the expense report. Contrib.txt will contain contribution information from Schedule I, Parts A, B, C and D as well as in-kind contributions from Schedule II, Parts F and G. Receipt.txt will contain information from Schedule I, Part E. Expense.txt will contain information from Schedule III. Debt.txt will contain information from schedule IV.