We've just gotten the following document, which gives us the latest on the Senate's plan to post official Senate expenses online this Congress.

Sunlight has been anticipating the first ever digital release of Senate expenses since 2009, when the new policy was passed, as a result of Senator Coburn's amendment, which followed on Speaker Pelosi's new policy.

It looks like the first view of the disclosures will happen in November, and cover April to September. Most disappointingly, the information will be disclosed as a PDF. The legislation was rather clearly intended to create the release of actual data, not data in the difficult-to-reuse form of a paper document. Unfortunately, PDF documents can meet the standard of searchable (as long as the text is exposed), and itemized (if the items are listed), so the Senate is getting by on a technicality, and reaching for the lowest common denominator.

You can expect us to continue to try to get this released as a proper dataset -- more often than semi-annual, and perhaps most importantly, as structured data.

This should still be a big step forward, since the Senate expenses were only released before as a semi-annual book that almost no one knew about. We'll also be watching to be sure that the information available is at least as detailed as the information contained in the old, print edition of these disclosures.

Here's the letter:

Senate Expenses PDF

Yesterday, Rep. Gary Peters introduced a bill that would require reports on House Members' expenditures to be posted on House.gov.

The House and Senate only just recently created new policies to require that their expenses (officially, the Statements of Disbursements) would be posted online. While we're still waiting for the Senate to start posting expense tracking, the House has been posting quarterly expenses since early 2010. Sunlight uses those expense reports to create a searchable database of expenses, and also to create a directory of House staffers.

Rep. Peters' bill (H.Res 135) would create a mandate for the Chief Administrative Officer to release expenses online (currently this process is based on a letter from Speaker Pelosi, and Speaker Boehner's continuation of the same policy). The bill would also have Member-specific reports posted on House.gov, and require each Member to create a link on their site to their reports.

This is a step in the right direction. We'll also be working for data-level access to the disbursements data (which is currently posted in a PDF that we parse), and more timely disclosure (than the once-per-quarter system we have now).

We've put up a new database.

On Monday, the House published their Statements of Disbursements online for the first time, giving us a new digital view into how the US House spends public funds.

Today, the Sunlight Foundation is releasing a searchable database of members' expenditures, one dataset within the broader PDF released earlier this week.

Since the expenses were released in a PDF, they're difficult to search or analyze. Large datasets like this are best accessed as data, where sorting and grouping make patterns visible, and alternative visualizations possible.

That's why we've digitized some of the document's contents -- to make them more meaningful and accessible.

To understand what the numbers mean, we recommend consulting the materials presented on disbursements.house.gov, which has been lauded for its completeness.

We'll have much more to share on this data soon, from many different angles.

Update: Here's coverage from Sunlight's Real Time Investigations.