Through its drive for transparency the government is encouraging councils to make more of their information available in a way which can be easily shared and reused. This is called open data and is part of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015.

We’re committed to making our finances clear and as part of this commitment we publish details of every transaction on a government procurement card. Each report lists all corporate card spending from each month, excluding VAT.

To help you understand the quarterly reports, below explains the data in each column heading of the report.

• Body name – name of the organisation making the payment
• Body – code to identify the organisation making the payment
• Service area categorisation – the service area that has spent the money
• Responsible unit – the part of the departments that made the payment
• Expenses type – description of the type of expenditure
• Date – the date that the payment was processed by our payments system
• Amount – the actual value of the payment, excluding VAT
• Supplier name – the name of the supplier or the organisation
• Transaction number – a reference number for each payment