Unveiling FIT's latest enhancements: school district data and the return of FIT’s most requested feature

Aug 21, 2024

The Office of the Washington State Auditor is happy to announce two exciting pieces of news related to the Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT)! FIT is our way of providing easy, free access to the financial data of more than 2,300 local governments in our state. 

Read on for more information about each feature. 

A new chapter: Explore your school district’s finances in SAO’s Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) 

The new FIT now includes data from all 295 Washington public school districts. Anyone with internet access can explore this data on their phone or computer in a few clicks or taps. 

You can enjoy unique FIT profiles for any school district, including four years’ worth of revenues and expenditures, as well as financial health indicators and enrollment numbers. If you want to compare data from school districts statewide, FIT can gather all of that in one place. 

Getting started is a breeze  

Go to portal.sao.wa.gov/FIT on your cellphone, tablet or computer, and from this main FIT webpage, select from the following options: 

  1. Choose the “Individual Governments” option to see a single school district’s data. 

  1. Choose the “Government Types” option to explore statewide data for all school districts. 

  1. Type the name of any school district in the “Search FIT” search bar to go directly to its profile. 

While we designed FIT with ease in mind, we understand it may be new to you. The Center of Government Innovation provides personalized trainings for local governments that seek a more hands-on experience. Simply email us at Center@sao.wa.gov.  

Return of the king: explore the details of any government’s finances with the return of this popular feature 

Any user can once again dive into the details of a government’s finances and explore more than a decade’s worth of data at the account level for more than 2,000 governments.  

With this feature, you can: 

  • View 11 years of trended data for most local governments and government types 

  • See, sort and filter data by type of fund, revenue and expenditure 

  • Filter statewide trended data by county 

  • Display finances by percent change, percent of total and per capita or per student, where applicable 

  • View details of each financial health ratio’s underlying data 

  • Export any view into Microsoft Excel to analyze further 

Like you, the return of this feature brings us much joy. Thank you for your patience while we made sure we could make this available for everyone on any device. 

The evolution of FIT and how to reach out for more information 

We created FIT with one idea in mind: to make local government financial information easy to understand and interpret, even for those without a financial background. Since 2019, users of FIT have enjoyed learning and analyzing the data of nearly all local governments in our state: from cities and counties to cemeteries and fire districts.  

FIT is also a collaborative effort between SAO, our state’s local governments and public users alike. Thank you for engaging with FIT and for your ongoing suggestions, comments and feedback. For questions, please email us at Center@sao.wa.gov 

Share this exciting news with your colleagues, and together we can keep building transparency into financial data in a fun, engaging and accessible way. Explore FIT, today!