Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin on April 28 unveiled an updated, enhanced version of the Checkbook L.A. website, which allows the public to review current and historical data on how the city spends its money on goods and services.

Users can search by department, vendor or item, and will find data for 2022 and each fiscal year back through 2013.

The latest upgrades to Checkbook L.A. include new visuals showing city spending by fund, department and vendor; improved search functionality; and easy-to-download views of the master dataset.

Users can search for an item, program, fund name or department to pull up a summary of related spending. To drill down further, users can toggle between snapshots by account, vendor, department or category, and they can click on the bar chart to look into spending to a greater extent. Expenditures are also viewable in a checkbook format, which provides transaction-by-transaction detail. All of the data is downloadable.

The city of Los Angeles has spent $7.25 billion so far in fiscal year 2022. Spending in 2021 was $10.33 billion, including $250 million from the COVID-19 Federal Relief Fund.

City employee pensions are the top expense category in 2022, accounting for nearly 20% ($1.5 billion) of all spending.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has the highest spending of all city departments, making up nearly 15% of spending in 2022. Most of the funding has gone to energy suppliers.

Nearly $675 million has been spent out of the city’s general fund on goods and services in 2022, including $185 million by the city’s General Services Department, $86 million by the Los Angeles Police Department and $64 million by the city’s Bureau of Street Services.

For information, visit lacontroller.org/checkbookla.