Town checkbook

Notes

What "the budget" means

$127.3M is the FY26 annual operating envelope (Town general fund $69.1M + School general fund $47.6M + Water $6.9M + Sewer $4.8M + Harbor $1.3M). Capital and tax articles, grants, and the revolving and trust funds have not yet posted to the portal for FY27 (see "FY27 budget coverage" below). The Light Department runs as a self-supporting enterprise outside the appropriation process. The Budget vs Actual chart above covers that operating envelope.

FY27 budget coverage

The budget portal currently carries the FY27 annual operating budget: the town and school general funds plus the water, sewer, and harbor enterprise funds. Budgets for the capital and tax articles, grants, and the revolving and trust funds had not yet posted for FY27 as of early July 2026, though checks drawn on those funds appear in the ledger as they are paid. For scale, FY26's adopted budget across all funds, with those categories included, was $206.1M.

Budget vs spent vs vendor payments

The budget portal also publishes an actual spending rollup that includes payroll and inter-fund transfers; the $108.1M on this page is just vendor checks (the accounts-payable side). In FY26, the portal's rollup reached $140.4M through May 29 against $99.9M in vendor checks; the gap between the two is mostly payroll.

Why some bars look over budget

The Light Department is self-supporting and has no appropriation, so its spending shows up against a $0 budget. Snow Removal is intentionally under-budgeted and topped up at year-end (in FY26 it spent $687K against a $105K budget). Neither is a runaway expense.

Why the state was FY26's top vendor

In FY26, $17.5M of checks went to "Commonwealth of MA," more than to any other payee. Most of it is health insurance: $12.8M booked under Group Insurance, the premiums the town pays the state's GIC for employee and retiree coverage. The rest is state assessments and charges spread across town and enterprise funds. A sliver moves through agency funds such as "Due to Commonwealth - Firearms": firearms license fees the town collects and passes through to the state ($19,425 in FY26). "Due to" funds are pass-throughs the town holds briefly on the state's behalf, never the town's money to spend.

Vendor names are ledger labels

Names come straight from the town's accounts-payable ledger. "ONE TIME PAY" ($1.2M across 14 funds) is the ledger's bucket for one-off payees, not a company. "Marblehead Light Dept" appearing as a vendor is town and school departments paying the municipal Light Department for electricity. Where the ledger splits one payee across spelling variants ("National Grid" and "National Grid Company") or garbles a name at the export's 50-character limit, we merge and repair the display using a curated alias list; hover any row to see the ledger's original string.

What we redacted

The town's source export tags specific employees by surname for medical claims under the 111F Injury Leave Fund (e.g., "BURT INJURY" paid to Spaulding Rehab) and lists student initials for out-of-district SpEd placements. We drop the Description column entirely and pull every row in the 111F and Workers Comp funds (560 rows, $413K, in FY26). The aggregate is still in the budget chart above.

Source files

checkbook_FY26_2026-06-30.csv · budget_actual_FY26.json · checkbook_performance.json · checkbook_redaction_disclosure.json · checkbook_labels.json