Where your money goes

As we are committed to being open and transparent with our residents, we are publishing the individual payments of over £500 which we have made to suppliers.

This information will only include non-personal data as the Data Protection Act requires us to keep personal details private.

As we are increasing our working with the Vale of White Horse District Council (Vale) and other Oxfordshire councils to deliver better value for money public services, our spending information does not include cross payments between the councils when one takes the lead. For example, where we have a joint contract with the Vale, we pay the full amount due to the supplier, recharge Vale for their costs and receive re-imbursement.

We have used our financial management system to produce the information which we have formatted into a standard good practice template. The data is separated into:

organisational unit description and code - residents can clearly see which service was responsible for making the purchase
internal cost code – this identifies the general nature of our spend
CIPFA expenses type - this supports our internal cost codes and allows comparisons to other authorities (as not all authorities use the same internal cost codes)
transaction date – residents are able to identify when we made the payment
transaction number – our financial management system uses this internal reference
net amount – this shows the full cost of the transaction (excluding VAT)
supplier name – residents can identify the recipient of each transaction
supplier ID – this allows us to distinguish between suppliers with the same name and also to match suppliers together if their names have changed

In line with good practice, we will publish spending data every quarter and in two formats: