AIPAC Built Its Monthly FEC Filing Review on Files.com Between Two Deadlines

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) works to persuade the federal government to enact policies that strengthen the US–Israel relationship. Its political engagement runs through federal committees whose finances must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. For AIPAC, that disclosure was a monthly event: a filing assembled, reviewed, approved, and submitted on a deadline that did not move.

In early 2026, AIPAC decided that chain would run as a governed process on one platform.

Three Parties, Two Review Tiers, One Fixed Deadline

An FEC filing is not one document. Each month, AIPAC's filing vendor generated the reports, in PDF and spreadsheet form, that Finance reviewed, executives signed off on, and the vendor then submitted to the Commission. Every handoff in that chain crossed an organizational boundary, and every stage had to finish on time for the next one to start.

AIPAC wanted the process itself enforced by a system. The filing was the first workload in a broader decision to move sensitive external file exchange onto one governed platform.

The constraint was the calendar. The workflow spanned an outside vendor and two tiers of internal review, and the deadline never paused: the new process had to be designed, built, tested, and trusted in the space between one month's filing and the next. Anything that slipped meant waiting another month.

Finance went first, and the FEC filing set the requirements. The platform had to give the vendor a controlled intake point, hold each review stage behind its own permissions, notify reviewers the moment files arrived, and keep a record of every access. And it had to be in production before the next filing. AIPAC selected Files.com to carry that workflow.

Five Weeks From Site Activation to a Production Filing

The Files.com site went live in January 2026, with Finance as the first department in a phased rollout. AIPAC mapped the filing onto a folder structure that mirrored its stages: an intake point where the vendor delivered each month's reports, a Finance review stage, an executive review stage, and the handoff back to the vendor for submission. Folder-level permissions in Files.com determined who could reach each stage, so the vendor saw its intake, Finance worked its review, and executives saw what was ready for them and nothing else.

Files.com notifications, delivered by email and Slack, were configured to announce each arrival. A stage advancing became something reviewers were told about the moment it happened. Every upload, access, and download along the way landed in the Files.com audit log.

The timing was designed in, with stages and notifications tuned to the monthly FEC cadence. The finished workflow went through a one-time, four-day testing and validation cycle ahead of the vendor's February 2026 filing, then carried that filing in production, roughly five weeks after the site first went live.

A Filing Process Finance Can See and Control

With the workflow in production, AIPAC runs a regulatory process that Files.com makes visible and controlled.

• The FEC filing now follows a defined four-day process each month. Each stage has a folder and a permission boundary, and reviewers are notified when it advances, so every handoff happens on schedule.
• The reports stay on one platform from vendor intake to submission, and each review tier reaches only the stage that is theirs.
• There is a record. Every access and download of a filing report sits in the Files.com audit log, ready for whoever asks.

The pattern also proved reusable. Within weeks of launch, more third-party file feeds moved onto the same platform: expense extracts arriving from Concur over SFTP and decrypted automatically with GPG for Finance, data feeds for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and an outbound SFTP payroll feed to UKG running under AIPAC's own branded domain on dedicated IPs.

A Deadline Met by a Process

A regulated, deadline-bound workflow is exactly the kind of thing organizations hesitate to rebuild, because there is never a safe month to do it. AIPAC built its filing workflow on Files.com in the space between two filings, validated it in four days, and ran the very next filing on it.