The Desk of Matt Cone · Fiscal stewardship
SBISD Check Register Transparency
Sunlight on the Spending.
Spring Branch ISD publishes every check. Almost nobody reads 97,000 rows. This page does — so families, trustees, and taxpayers can see where the money went, in public, without spinning it.
Source: the district’s official Check Register. This is not an SBISD publication. Automated “for review” items are heuristics. They do not allege wrongdoing.
Net payments
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Transactions
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Vendors
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Latest complete FY
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From the published file
What the checks list
Reading aid
Patterns in the register
These cards are produced by written rules on the published payments — large amounts, clusters, one-time payees, month-to-month changes. They are a reading aid so 97,000 rows are easier to scan. They are not allegations. Routine payees (IRS, TRS, cities, food distributors, major construction firms, utilities) are screened out of the large-payment list.
Trends
How the spending moves
Monthly net
Fiscal year
By category
Categories are keyword rules on vendor names, not the district’s account codes.
Payment size
Vendors
Who was paid
Click a row to open that vendor in the register.
Register
Every published payment
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Method
How this page was built
Each monthly page on checkregister.springbranchisd.com is a public HTML table (Date, Vendor, Amount, Void). Rows are cached, then cleaned: HTML entities are decoded until they stop changing; vendor names are uppercased; punctuation is normalized; amounts are numbers; Texas ISD fiscal years run July–June and are labeled by the ending calendar year (FY2026 = July 2025–June 2026). Calendar 2021 and the current year are partial. Year-over-year is shown only for complete 12-month fiscal years.
Categories are keyword matches on the vendor name, in a fixed order, first match wins. They are not the district’s account codes. A “person” label is a name-shape heuristic (two to four alphabetic tokens, no business words). Payees that look like people but total $40,000 or more net are treated as businesses and run through the keyword rules again.
The “What the checks list” tables are totals from this file: payee name, dollar sum, payment count, fiscal year. They do not state why a check was written. The automated pattern cards are a reading aid. They do not allege wrongdoing. Routine large payees — tax authorities, TRS, cities, Harris County, food distributors, listed construction firms, utilities, benefits administrators — are screened out of the large-payment list.
Classroom versus central-office totals come from the Whitley Penn FY2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (TEA function codes), not from vendor names. The check register and the audit are different reports.
This is not an official SBISD publication. The district remains the source of the underlying payments. If a row here disagrees with the live register, the live register wins.
Downloads (CSV, Excel-friendly):
- Unified cleaned register
- By fiscal year
- By month
- By calendar year
- By category
- Top vendors
- Review flags
Matthew T. Cone · The Desk · matthewtcone.com. Built for sunlight, not spin.