Bristol City Council Supplier Payments Over £500 with Department Details

Bristol City Council publishes monthly reports of individual payments to suppliers valued over £500. The data includes supplier name, amount, purchase description, department, payment date, and transaction number, with VAT excluded. Publication is part of the council's commitment to transparency, with payments made via purchase cards presented separately and certain categories like salaries and refunds excluded.

Use Cases

• Analyze spending patterns by purchasing department based on the department field mentioned in the description.
• Identify major suppliers to the local authority based on the supplier name and aggregated payment amounts.
• Monitor monthly expenditure trends and outliers based on the payment date and amount fields.
• Examine the nature of public purchases based on the description of what was bought for each transaction.

Strengths

• Data is published monthly as part of a formal transparency commitment by Bristol City Council.
• Reports detail six specific fields per transaction: supplier, amount, description, department, date, and transaction number.
• Explicitly documents exclusions (e.g., salaries, refunds) and handling of edge cases like sub-£500 payments with VAT.
• Available under the OGL-UK-3.0 license, facilitating reuse.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic and institutional bias inherent to a single UK local authority.

Provenance

Source

Bristol City Council

Collection Method

Administrative records of supplier payments.

Time Range

Monthly coverage, specific start date unknown.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-28 12:04:38.872878; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Bristol, United Kingdom.