The District Balance Sheet reports provide information about district assets, liabilities and fund balances for a given school year.
There are two Balance Sheet reports:
- The Balance Sheet Summary report illustrates the assets and liabilities of a district. Balances can be viewed as a trend over time, or in detail in the Entity Breakdown view.
- The Balance Sheet Detail report shows a more detailed breakout of the balance sheet data.
These reports can be used to view, analyze, and compare balance sheet data across districts, school years, and the state. If a district’s liabilities outweigh assets, it means the district is running a fund deficit, which may be an indicator of financial distress.
The “percent” columns show the proportion of assets/liabilities/fund balance in relation to operating expenditures: day-to-day costs incurred during the normal operation of a business, including sales and supplies.
Finances can be complex, so use caution when forming conclusions. For example, a district may be running a deficit in certain funds, but taking into account all of their funds added together, their fund balance may be fine.
The reports are updated in early winter. See the Recently Posted Reports page for when the report was last updated.
Use the Location and Report Settings to select a location, school year, fund type and major class (revenue source).
Data view options include:
- Snapshot (a graph and table of the selected data)
- Trend (a graph and table showing changes over time)
- Entity Breakdown (a table shows the data for the selected entity and related entities; if you’ve selected a particular district, the Entity Breakdown would show data for that district, ISD and individual buildings within the district)
See the MI School Data Quick Start Guide for the basics of navigating the site and customizing a report.
Location Options
Locations Setting options: Statewide, ISD and District
CEPI collected the data used to compile this report using the Financial Information Database. Details about the FID can be found on the FID web page. The data reported in this report were submitted and certified through the FID collection by each district/ISD. As such, outliers observed in the report reflect data as received by CEPI within the collection period of FID data. Late submissions and/or corrected data submitted by districts/ISDs after the FID collection was closed will be included in a spring release of financial data; therefore, data in this report are subject to change. Users may identify, interpret, and use anomalous data values accordingly.
Financial statements of school districts in Michigan are prepared in conformity with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for government units. These accounting rules used to prepare, present, and report financial statements are established by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board.
The Michigan Department of Education publishes Change Notices on their website when names and/or descriptions of accounting codes are changed or added to the Michigan Public School Accounting Manual. MI School Data uses the most recent name changes to the accounting codes in the financial reports; however, users can view the historical names and descriptions of accounting codes by going to the Michigan Public School Accounting Manual page where Change Notices going back to 2014 can be found.
The Michigan Public School Accounting Manual serves as the guide to uniform classification and recording of accounting transactions for public school districts. Refer to the manual for a better understanding of the classifications, categories and definitions used by districts and found in this report. The Appendix - Definition of Account Codes is a useful reference.
The Statewide calculations do not include public school academies and ISD Districts (districts created from ISDs).
Statewide files that include data for all entity types are available as downloadable Financial Data Files.
If you have questions not addressed here or in the linked resources, please contact CEPI customer support at cepi@michigan.gov.
Report Labels
See the Glossary for additional terms and acronyms used on MI School Data.
