Data & Stuff

Last week I commented on the proposal that councils would have to publish their payments made to suppliers that were over £500. You can see my full thoughts, here – Local Data – Payment Publishing Response.

This week, it appears that Adrian Short, has taken the data released from Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and produced Armchair Auditor.

This is a website that simply takes the CSV information provided by the council, pulls it into a database, and allows you to examine it by Directorate (Services), and Supplier (Company paid for delivering a service). It is quite nice and easy to use, and you can simply see that, for instance, Capita Business Services Ltd were paid 15 times, totalling £52,493 between Sept 2009 and March 2010, the average amount of each payment was £3,499.

It also highlights the fact that the Supplier Master may give you a bit more information than you currently have. As Capita are shown as:

• Capita Business Services Ltd
• Capita Education Resourcing
• Capita Education Services Ltd
• Capita Software Services
• Capita Training Ltd

So it looks like these are related businesses, indeed seperate companies, but the ultimate beneficial owner maybe ‘Capita Group PLC’. It also shows that payments were made to Capita Education Resourcing and Capita Education Services. These may actually be one company, and just different divisions within the company structure. If you had a full supplier master, it’s likely that these different suppliers will have an indicator to show that they are ‘related’.

A quick check at Companies House doesn’t actually show a result for Capita Education, nor some of the others. For instance Capita Education Resourcing is a trading name of Capita Resourcing Ltd, likewise this may be the same for Education Services.  Companies may be trading under many different names, all of which are actually present as different suppliers in the system, therefore the actual company may be receiving more funds from the council than you presume at first thought.

All of the above was found through a quick play with Armchair Auditor, it shows the strength of the tool at being able to get to the data quickly, and concisely as well as being able to direct someone to your findings with relative ease.

Whilst at the same time, we can see the challenge at understanding the data, especially when you start to look across councils and try and answer questions like ‘How much is supplier X getting paid for services bought by councils across the country’. I’ll discuss approaches for how you might deal with that situation another day.

For now, I’m going to look at the work Adrian has done, and see what else might be interesting within it.

This is my response to Publishing Itemised Local Authority Expenditure Advice, unfortunately the captcha appears to be broken when I attempted to post this.

These are just my personal thoughts, and may be incorrect, and they do not represent the thoughts of my employer.

Supplier Identification
I disagree with the phrase ‘Ideally publication would include the Companies House number (or equivalent in the case of foreign companies) or Charity registration number‘. This depends on the quality of data entered into the system, in my experience such level of detail (at least for private sector companies) is never recorded in a Supplier master. You will have the Supplier Name, Internal Supplier ID, Address fields, basic contact details (with a CRM system likely to be holding more details).

Such information is not easy to populate into a system if it’s not already present, I remember a case where we had to identify Dun&Bradstreet numbers for every supplier – it wasn’t an easy job.

I would say, this boils down to one thing – why do you require that level of information, what is wrong with the company name after all unless we are talking about data quality issues?

I’d also be wary of needing to publish the actual contact details for each company, depending how a companies supplier master is setup, you may have the contact details for the person in Accounts Payable. What use is that to the end user? It would need to be researched to understand exactly what data is present etc.

Payroll/Benefits
Dependent on how the Supplier master is setup, it is possible for employee expense reimbursements to be present (i.e every employee is setup as a vendor). Most systems allow you to identify these, not all do though. So it may be possible to anonymise these.

Payroll, at the General Ledger level is likely to be a few entries (the transactions hitting the GL Payroll account, and the bank account), the Payroll data of actual payments (BACS likely) may be held separately to that of where normal supplier payments are made (again, dependent on system structure – I’ve seen them a few ways).

Overall
The other thing to remember, is that in some cases, the data output is likely to be:

01/01/2010
CHQ
£2256.89
A1 Company
INVXYZ002 (or some document reference)
GL CODE
GL Description (i.e Transportation)
Cost Centre Code
Cost Centre (Parks Department).

The above shows that the Parks department paid A1 Company, £2256.89 on -01/01/2010, for a service that the invoice was booked to transportation, and the cost absorbed through the parks department budget.

You’d be surprised how many times there are some systems where it’s not totally easily to identify the payment, back to the relevant invoice (apart from a manual reconciliation), you need to know the invoice side of the transactions – as that is where the cost will be booked to (as the payment details will just be crediting cash, debiting Accounts Payable).

It all depends what level of detail you want to show, it’s easy enough to show a payment went out (but associated services, dependent on the internal reporting functions of the system – may be harder).

These are just my thoughts, from my experiences of working with a multitude of different financial systems from your SAP, to your BAAN and SunSystem.

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