Getting Started for New Candidates

If this is the first time you are filing with the FEC, we have a short guide to help you make your filing a success.

Bank statements are helpful, though are missing two key details needed by the FEC. Address, and Purpose.

The FEC also requires certain expenses to be itemized, like a credit card payment or payroll. Those transactions typically are for multiple transactions that the FEC wants to know who was paid for transparency purposes.

A refunded contribution is double entered into Campaign Deputy. Once as a Contribution, and another as a Disbursement. If you are calculating your total raised, your amount might not match the Contribution report as it will include refunded contributions.

Due to an bug on ActBlue's side. An ActBlue contribution may appear in Campaign Deputy that has disappeared from the ActBlue dashboard. We recommend to enable the CSV API on your ActBlue Integration to identify those and decide if you want to mark them as refunded or remove them from your Campaign Deputy account.

According to FEC regulations, a candidate who spends their personal funds on the campaign must enter that as an In-Kind contribution or a Loan. Only Loans can be reimbursed by the campaign. A common issue is a Loan is added and the Disbursement is not causing an inflated Cash on Hand amount. Make sure to add in the Disbursement for what the loan was used for.

If you are migrating from another system later in the cycle, you will need to add in more transactions than only the next report. The FEC reports have Column B "Cycle to Date", which the FEC uses to flag accounts they believe are not following the regulations. If you have previous reports in FECFile, etc, you must import the following to your account.

• All Contributions for the entire cycle

• All Disbursements for the entire cycle

• Any open loan or debt

If you have a small number of vendors, and you are not amending prior reports, you can put in a Disbursement for the total amount to your prior report for each vendor. For example, if you have paid for Google Workspace for 6 months, you could enter one Disbursement for $60 (6 * $10) which will allow you to match the Cycle to Date and Column B numbers for your past report.