What's included, where it comes from, and what it means.
OpenSpringfield is an independent civic transparency project. It takes public financial records from the City of Springfield, Ohio and makes them searchable, sortable, and understandable for any resident who wants to know where their tax dollars are going.
This is not affiliated with the City of Springfield. All data was obtained through public records requests under Ohio's Public Records Act (ORC §149.43), which guarantees every Ohio citizen the right to access government records.
Every check and electronic payment (EFT) made by the City of Springfield to outside vendors, contractors, and service providers during 2025. This includes utility payments, construction contracts, supplies, professional services, and more.
Electronic transfers for payroll taxes (IRS), pension contributions (OPERS), health insurance premiums, union dues, and other payroll deductions. These appear as EFT payments to entities like "Internal Revenue Services," "950 Pension Liability Fund," and "961 Health Care Fund."
January 3, 2025 through December 26, 2025, covering substantially the entire calendar year.
For each payment: the vendor name, payment date, dollar amount, payment method (check or EFT), and document reference number.
This data represents a significant portion of city spending, but it's not the complete picture. Here's what's missing:
Employee names, salaries, overtime, and total compensation are not included. While the payroll-related transfers (taxes, pension, insurance) appear as EFT payments, individual employee compensation does not.
City departments use purchasing cards for smaller purchases. These transactions are processed through the card issuer and don't appear in the check/EFT payment registers we received.
The payment registers don't specify which city department or budget fund each payment came from. We know the city paid Ohio Edison $1M+, but we can't tell you how much was for streetlights vs. water treatment vs. city buildings.
Without the city's adopted budget, we can't show whether spending was over or under plan. Actual spending without budget context tells an incomplete story.
This site only shows the spending side. It does not include income tax collections, property tax revenue, state/federal grants received, fees, fines, or other revenue sources.
We currently only have 2025 data. Without prior years, we can't show whether spending is trending up or down, or how vendor relationships have changed over time.
We've submitted additional public records requests to expand the data on this site. Here's what we're working on:
Names, titles, departments, base salaries, overtime, and total compensation for all city employees. Payroll is typically the largest category of city spending.
The city's adopted annual budget alongside actual expenditures, broken down by department and fund.
Prior year payment registers to enable year-over-year spending comparisons and trend analysis.
Purchasing card transactions by department, vendor, and amount.
City revenue by source: income tax, property tax, grants, fees, and other income.
The payment data on this site was obtained through a public records request submitted to the City of Springfield, Ohio under ORC §149.43.
The city provided 153 payment register PDF files exported from their Oracle Cloud financial system. These included City Check Payment Registers, EFT Payment Registers, and External EFT Payment Registers spanning January through December 2025.
The PDF files were programmatically parsed to extract structured payment data. Text-based PDFs were processed directly; image-based PDFs were processed using optical character recognition (OCR). After extraction, the data was deduplicated and cleaned to remove parsing artifacts.
A note on accuracy: While we've taken care to extract data faithfully, the conversion from PDF to structured data is imperfect. Some records from image-based PDFs may contain minor errors. The source PDF documents are the authoritative record. If you notice a discrepancy, please let us know.
Every citizen of Ohio has the right to request public records from any public office. You don't need to give a reason, and the office must respond within a reasonable time. Here's how:
Questions, corrections, or suggestions are welcome at info@openspringfield.org.