Technical background information to accompany the Department for Education (DfE) Transparency spend over £25,000

These notes accompany the reports which show all the Department and its executive agencies’ transactions over £25,000.

Data Source

The data are provided by DfE’s shared service provider, DWP and are taken from the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Resource Management system.

Scope and coverage

The data sets show all transactions over £25,000 for the month in question.  Information which cannot be published because it would contravene the law has been redacted, for example personal information covered by the Data Protection Act. Any commercially sensitive transactions such as payments to individuals, have been made anonymous.

From November 2012 the data set will include a row showing the total value of all redacted items. This will contain:
1. A monthly payment of approximately £4b by DfE to the Education Funding Agency (EFA). This payment enables EFA to pay their invoices. To  include the transaction would, in effect, be double counting i) as spend by DfE and ii) as spend by EFA. Across the year this would look like the Department had exceeded its budget.
2. Payments to JP Morgan Commercial Cards for processing Government Procurement Card (GPC) transactions. GPC transactions over £500 are published separately and are therefore redacted to avoid duplication. 

Technical detail

The data disclosed is the amount recorded from the Accounts Payable module of the Resource Management system for each individual transaction.  Invoices are raised for every payment regardless of whether the payment is a contractual payment, a grant payment, a payment with or without a purchase order, etc. The reports are fully comprehensive, apart from those payments that have been redacted or those falling below the £25,000 payment threshold. 

No adjustments will be made to Accounts Payable transactions and data will therefore reflect how each individual item was originally recorded in our finance systems. We will make reasonable amendments to significant known errors.

General Points

The data includes some payments that are less than £25,000. This will happen if;
- A single invoice has been coded to multiple expense types and / or expense areas. The amount shown will be the amount paid against each individual expense area / type combination, even where each entry at this level may be less than £25,000;
- A number of invoices from the same supplier, which individually total below £25,000, are processed on the same day as a single payment;  
- The total amount paid to the supplier includes recoverable VAT which is charged to the VAT collection account not to the budget line.

Negative transactions 

The data does not include cash receipts as these are accounted for using the Accounts Receivable module. The data may include some negative amounts but these amounts are not receipts. These transactions occur when a credit note from a supplier is input to Accounts Payable, or when action has to be taken to correct an error in processing the payment. 

Specific Points

Teachers Pension Scheme Payments: The Department uses a contractor, Capita, to deliver the administration of the Teachers' Pension Scheme. There are large routine daily cash transfers to Capita to fund the payments they make to pensioners and others on behalf of the Department.