TycheDataGuide:ProcurementData
What is Procurement Data?
Procurement, or vendor payment data, identifies the goods and services that your government purchases. This data is at the individual expenditure level. Procurement data can assist in identifying how a government spends its money - what was acquired, from which vendors, at what cost, for what purpose.
Procurement data - in terms of data stories - is less about auditing or ensuring government is following standard accounting practice, and more about shedding visibility on what a government needs to purchase to operate effecitively. Procurement data also shines a light on how much things cost; few people understand how much a fire truck costs, or how much paving half of a mile of street costs.
Where does it come from?
Procurement or vendor payment data is typically managed by the Treasurer or Accounting office. Offices such as the Budget or Auditing offices will also have access to this data. Governments manage procurement data in commercial systems and export the data into machine readable forms such as .csv.
What are the primary and secondary data elements?
Procurement data can vary from government to government however the basic elements are typically similar:
- Identifier - a unique ID tied to each purchase event
- Dates - including contract dates, order dates and data entry dates
- Item description - what was purchased, what quantities, what category of good or service
- Costs - which can include total costs, subscription or multiyear costs
- Vendor - vendor name, address, demographics on the vendor (e.g. Women- or Minority-owned businesses)
- Purpose - what is the usage or reason behind the purchase
- Accounting information - cost center names and codes, G/L numbers, associated department budget
What are questions you can answer with procurement data?
- Who are your city's vendors?
- How many vendors does the city user for particular types of services such as road paving, office supplies, etc?
- How much does the city pay for specific types of goods or services?
- Does the city make user of local or non-local vendors?
- What are the trends - by vendor, by type of good or service - year over year?
Tips and tricks for using procurement data
- Ensure that you understand the different dates. If you will be reconciling spending within fiscal years, or if you are doing monthly, quarterly or yearly analysis you want to use the correct date field. For example, you may wanto use the purchase date rather than the date that the bill or invoice was paid.
- If you studying relationships between budgets and purchasing, ask how there are connections between these two datasets. For example, a G/L or cost center number could be the data point used to join the data together.
- Credit card, or P-Card purchasing, may not contain some level of detail that you need. "P-card procurement" refers to the streamlined purchasing of low-cost, high-volume goods and services by employees using a government-issued procurement (P-) card.