NTD Reporting Best Practices: From Annual Scramble to Continuous Reporting

This year at APTAtech, TransTrack’s Yuvaraj Mani presented on a process every U.S. transit agency knows all too well: NTD reporting.

NTD reporting touches nearly every corner of an agency. It requires agencies to pull together data from multiple systems and departments — all while working against very real deadlines and consequences.

But NTD reporting isn’t just paperwork. It’s funding.

In FY2025, $7.39 billion in federal transit funding was distributed through the Urbanized Area Formula Funding Program (Section 5307), with NTD data helping determine how those funds were allocated.

Revenue miles, passenger miles, route miles and operating expenses all feed into that formula. And when data is late, incomplete, or unresponsive, reporters can actually be excluded from that allocation entirely.

So, the question isn’t whether the data matters. It’s:

How can agencies build a reporting process that makes that data easier to manage, validate, and use.

One submission, five departments’ data

One of the reasons NTD reporting is so complex is that it isn’t really one reporting process. A single submission can require data from across an agency:

• Ridership provides unlinked trips and passenger miles, often from farebox systems or certified APCs.
• Finance provides revenues and operating and capital expenses.
• Maintenance and assets contribute fleet and facility inventories, condition data and TAM targets.
• Operations provides service supplied, energy consumption and workforce counts.
• Safety and security has its own major event and monthly reporting requirements.

That means five owners, five systems and five cadences — all feeding one federal submission. And because many forms are filed by mode and type of service, the complexity grows with every mode an agency operates.

Where the process breaks down

Despite differences in agency size, structure, and technology, we tend to see the same challenges surface.

1. A few people carry the load. Reporting often depends on one or two staff members who hold much of the institutional knowledge — and the risk.
2. Data lives in too many places. Finance, scheduling, APC and maintenance data might all live in separate systems, which means it ultimately gets reconciled by hand in spreadsheets.
3. Teams aren’t aligned. Different timelines and definitions across departments create inconsistencies and rework.
4. Issues surface too late. Variances are often discovered during validation, when there’s little time left to investigate and fix the root cause.

And all of this is happening against the clock.

Annual reports are due 120 days after fiscal year-end, MR-20 ridership reporting is due 30 days after each month-end, and major S&S-40 events must be reported within 30 days of the event.

One data problem, three complementary answers

There isn’t one technology or approach that solves every reporting challenge.

Instead, think about the problem in three complementary layers.

1. Govern it. Enterprise data governance helps establish cataloging, lineage, quality and auditability.
2. Standardize it. Open transit data specifications create shared schemas for operations data.
3. Operationalize it. Purpose-built NTD tools support the validation, forms, workflow and submission process.

These approaches aren’t competing solutions. Most agencies will combine more than one, but the goal across all three is the same: create a more consistent, explainable and manageable flow of data.

What 10+ years of NTD reporting has taught us

After more than a decade working through this process with transit agencies, there are a few lessons we keep coming back to.

Year-end pain is a symptom

The cause is ungoverned monthly data. If data isn’t being reviewed and maintained throughout the year, the annual submission becomes the moment when months of issues finally surface.

Clean year-ends start with monthly visibility

Variances are cheapest when they’re fresh: A flag in month two is a footnote. The same flag in month fourteen is a fire drill. The earlier an agency catches an unexpected variance, the easier it is to understand what happened and address the underlying cause.

Definitions drift: What counts as a trip or a service hour can differ by department — until everyone aligns around the same definition. Establishing those definitions early helps prevent inconsistencies from becoming year-end reconciliation exercises.

Key-person risk is the quiet killer: If reporting lives in one person’s head, the process breaks the day they’re out. Documenting where numbers come from, who owns them and how they’re calculated helps turn institutional knowledge into an organizational process.

From annual scramble to continuous reporting

Taken together, those lessons point toward a bigger shift: NTD reporting shouldn’t begin when the annual deadline starts approaching.

The traditional process probably sounds familiar: compile data once a year under deadline, reconcile systems by hand, discover variances during validation and rely heavily on the knowledge of individual staff members.

A continuous approach looks different.

Data is captured and validated throughout the year. Every number can be explained on demand. Staff spend less time fixing data and more time using it.

And perhaps most importantly, submission becomes an output, not a project.

Once that foundation exists, the same governed data can serve planning, performance and grants — not just compliance.

Three things your agency can change right now

Moving from an annual scramble to continuous reporting doesn’t have to happen all at once.

1. Own the data. Assign one named owner per dataset. Document where each number comes from. Create a simple who-provides-what checklist.

2. Review earlier. Conduct monthly or quarterly data reviews. Flag variances as they happen. Align definitions upfront.

3. Automate the repetitive. Create recurring reports instead of rebuilds. Use year-over-year anomaly flags. Work toward one reporting view instead of email chains.

These shifts don’t require more staff. They make better use of the team and systems you already have.

Because at the end of the day, the goal isn't simply to make it through another NTD submission. It’s to build a reporting process where the data is current, explainable and useful all year long.

What this looks like in practice

At Broward County Transit (BCT), keeping data current throughout the year changed what happened at year-end.

Monthly maintenance replaced the year-end rebuild, standardized imports and validation reduced manual entry, and staff spent less time fixing data and more time using it.

The result was a 70% reduction in NTD reporting time — from more than 45 days to 14.

The important lesson isn’t simply that reporting became faster. It’s why it became faster: year-end became review rather than reconstruction.

More resources

Explore the NTD Reporting Guide → https://www.transtracksystems.net/ntd-reporting-playbook

Explore the NTD Reporting webpage → https://www.transtracksystems.net/ntd