Technical Background Information to accompany DfE spending over £25,000

These notes accompany the reports which show all the Department’s spending 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 spending 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. 

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. 

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.

Adjustments to correct actions within the system can be taken in both Accounts Payable and the General Ledger. The prints are drawn from Accounts Payable rather than the General Ledger so they will not reflect any corrective action taken in the General Ledger to change the accounting detail once the payment has been made. The most common types of post payment action are:
- Recharging the cost to a different budget line where the wrong account or cost centre code has been used in error; and/or
- Breaking an aggregate payment down into greater accounting detail to spread a charge across a number of budget lines, where this has not been done in the invoice.  

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.

The School Food Trust (SfT) Payments:

The School Food Trust became a national charity and specialist advisor to Government on school meals, children’s food and related skills on the 1 October 2011. Data on spend for the School Food Trust will therefore no longer be published on the Department’s Transparency Spend over £25,000 or on www.data.gov.uk.