The chart below contains the most common aggregate finance categories that are used in tables and special tabulations containing government finance statistics. For each category, there is a corresponding listing of the detailed finance item codes that comprise the aggregate. To derive the totals for a financial category, it is necessary to tabulate the individual item codes associated with the category as shown below.

This methodology applies equally to individual governments and to groups of governments, with two notable exceptions for the latter. When aggregating by level of government (all local governments or all state governments), any corresponding intergovernmental revenue from other same-level governments or intergovernmental expenditure to other same-level governments must be excluded from the totals. Thus for the total revenue category for all local governments, no item codes of the type Dnn (nn being any numeric) should be tabulated, since intergovernmental revenues from local governments are netted from aggregates.

Similarly for state and local government aggregates, intergovernmental transactions among same-level governments and between levels of government must be excluded. Thus for the total revenue category for all state and local governments, no item codes of the type Cnn (from State governments) and Dnn (from local governments) should be tabulated. Corresponding expenditure aggregates must follow the same methodology and exclude the appropriate intergovernmental expenditure item codes (those with alpha prefixes of L - R for state and local government totals).

Users should note that this chart contains every possible item code for each category. Even though an item code is listed below, there are several cases where it might not be included in an aggregate amount. These cases are as follows:

1. For an individual government, a specific type of revenue might not exist or an expenditure activity might not be one that is performed by a government. For example, most local governments do not have the full range of taxes represented by the item codes, nor do they necessarily provide each and every function of expenditure.
2. The same might be true of groups of governments. One example would be that there are no local government workers compensation systems, so that the revenue and expenditure codes dealing with this activity would be excluded from the totals for local governments.
3. Over time, a limited number of classification changes have resulted in the introduction of new item codes or the removal of other codes. While these have been kept to minimum, they might come into play for a user working with historical data sets.