Invoices over £500

We publish all invoices over £500 that are paid each month. We publish the data each month in three formats - Microsoft Excel, CSV and Adobe PDF to make the data as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Since January 2011 every council has been required to publish details of invoices over £500. In September 2010 we started by publishing details of invoices over £500 that have been paid by our Environment, Highways and Waste services.

Making sense of the invoice information

This is what the data looks like:

Example of invoice data

The files contain details of all invoices paid in the reporting month that have a value of £500 or more (excluding VAT). We will not be publishing details of payments that are of a personal nature, such as those to foster carers.

The data is split into six columns containing:

the reference number for the payment being made
the name of the supplier/organisation receiving the payment
the date the payment was processed by our payments system
the value of the payment on the invoice in pounds excluding VAT
the part of the council (we call them directorates) that made the payment
the cost type which shows how we categorise the payment (we use more than 700 different cost types to help us identify and manage our spending).

For accounting purposes, the council is organised into five areas. For invoices April 2011 onwards, these five areas are: