Data SourcesPublic-source inventory

Data Sources

Primary Texas Comptroller data sources powering the explorer, how they are accessed, and what each one can honestly support.

What powers the explorer

Texas State Spending Explorer is intentionally built on public Texas Comptroller sources that can be refreshed and audited without inventing hidden joins.

Payments

State payment exports across available fiscal years.

County layer

Annual county-level distribution of state spending.

Enrichment

Taxonomies, vendor files, and statewide context tables.

Implementation notes

These rules keep the product honest when the public data is fragmented or incomplete.

The transaction feed is exported from the public Qlik interface because the portal does not expose a stable bulk API for the Payments to Payee view.

County pages are backed by a separate annual fact table so the app never invents transaction-level geography that the public source data does not provide.

Vendor enrichment is stored as a distinct layer with explicit match records, confidence, and review status instead of being hidden in application code.

Primary explorer sources

These are the sources that directly drive the product surface users see on tx-spends.org.

Transaction layerNear-daily public dashboard

Payments to Payee

Exported from the Comptroller transparency portal

Product limitation

No public vendor IDs or payment geography, so payee enrichment stays probabilistic and county joins stay separate.

Open official source

County geography layerAnnual fiscal-year reports

Texas State Expenditures by County

Published as county expenditure reports and open data slices

Product limitation

This is an annual aggregation layer, not a geocoded rollup of individual payment rows.

Open official source

Rollups and drilldownsSlow-moving reference tables

Comptroller object and category taxonomies

Reference tables and transparency taxonomy extracts

Product limitation

Some category mappings require a crosswalk because the payment feed and county layer expose different category shapes.

Open official source

Supporting and enrichment sources

These sources strengthen context and matching, but they do not override the limits of the public payment feed.

Procurement enrichmentNightly or current-state downloads

Vendor master downloads

Downloadable Comptroller purchasing files

Product limitation

Matched by normalized names rather than a released payment-side vendor ID, so the app labels these matches as approximate.

Open official source

IT procurement layerOpen-data export with fiscal-year line items

DIR Cooperative Contract Sales

Published through the Texas open data portal as a downloadable CSV

Product limitation

Represents sales reported through DIR cooperative contracts, not the full universe of state procurement activity.

Open official source

Macro context and reconciliationAnnual publication

Annual Cash Report

Official annual report with downloadable spreadsheets

Product limitation

Useful for fund-level statewide context, not transaction-level browsing or payee analysis.

Open official source

Data Health

See live row counts, fiscal year coverage, vendor match rates, and recent ingestion run status for every layer described above.

Live coverage and freshness report

Payment rows loaded, county fiscal years available, approximate vendor match coverage, and the timestamps of the most recent data loads.

View Data Health