About the FEC Form 3 Report

Applies To: Federal Election Commission

The FEC Form 3 Report is a campaign finance reporting disclosure of Receipts and Disbursements for authorized committees. To generate the report, go to the Reports tab, then to Compliance. On the resulting screen will be the criteria you’ll need to set in order to generate the report. Be sure to use the correct criteria in order to generate the necessary and compliant results. Some fields, including Previous General Election Date, can have a significant effect on totals.

The 012 Splits Independent of Whole version itemizes splits with reporting code 012 on Line 21 regardless of the whole parent reporting code.
The 012 Splits with Whole version itemizes splits on Line 21 if the whole transaction has reporting code 012.

Neither version is the right one, as this is a stylistic choice. The FEC has no preferred method.

The FEC Form 3 report parameter fields are as follows:

Date Range: Please ensure that your date range lines up with either standard FEC reporting dates or dates that are specific to your report. i.e. Pre-Primary, Post-General, etc.

Current Election: You will see a dropdown that contains all of the elections that are set up for your campaign.

Previous General Election: This field is extremely important to ensure you have the correct dates so to avoid errors.

Amended: If you are filing an amendment, if this is a new report this box should not be clicked. If you are filing an amendment you will click this box and additional fields will appear. You will need to select the report in which you are amending. All reports filed out of ISP will appear in the dropdown, if you filed your report outside of ISP you will select Filed Outside of ISP. You will then need your Original Report Number, this number will start with FEC-. The last additional field is the Number of Amendments. We recommend that amendment numbers go in order starting at 1.

Report Period: The available report periods will appear in the dropdown.

Previously Unitemized Individual Donations: This is another very import field that is required on your report. This number needs to be correct or it could cause calculation errors on your report. You have two options for filling in this field:

You can locate the number on the previously filed report. If your previously filed report was a Post-General or Year End with Col C, use the amount found in Col C here instead. Previous unitemized individual donations are reported on Line 11aii, Column B of your previously filed report.

You can click Get From FEC.

Aggregates for a new election cycle will restart the day after the election. If you have a whole transaction before the election and a split below the itemization threshold after the election, that split will not itemize on the report.

All Caps: This will generate your entire report in all caps.

Sort Order: If you click the dropdown this will give a variety of ways in which you can have your report sorted.

Notes: The notes block has a character max of 4000 characters. An example of when this could be used is if you need to inform the FEC of best efforts to obtain Occupation/Employer information or of a contribution over the limit that will be refunded on the next report.

We recommend upon completion of generating your FEC Form 3 report that you save it as a PDF for your records or to compare to other reports. This must be done at the time of generation, or you will not be able to save it as a PDF without generating. You can also download the e-Filing for your records as well.