Please provide the percentage of all payments made by your council in the most recent full financial year that were supported by an authorised Purchase Order at the time the payment was made.
With respect to the most recent full financial year, we do not hold this information in a central base. This would have to be extracted by a review of all every single payment made the council which would take more than the appropriate time limit of 18 hours. This information is therefore exempt from disclosure pursuant to section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
By way of assistance, we can confirm the information in the table below with respect to the current financial year. We should clarify that the majority of our accounts payable transactions are processed through Line of Business (LOB) systems, which do not operate a purchase order system.
As such we have provided the percentages for our invoices exc LOBs and inc LOBs.
We have also included the monthly breakdown, given our implementation of NO PO NO Pay (No Purchase Order No Payment) throughout this year, the values increase notably month on month.
| Invoice With PO | Total Proactis Invoices | Total All Invoices | Proactis % | Inc LoB % | Invoices via Proactis | |
| Apr-25 | 1671 | 5615 | 16888 | 29.8% | 9.9% | 33.2% |
| May-25 | 2632 | 4705 | 26214 | 55.9% | 10.0% | 17.9% |
| Jun-25 | 2983 | 5268 | 25342 | 56.6% | 11.8% | 20.8% |
| Jul-25 | 4270 | 5779 | 31283 | 73.9% | 13.6% | 18.5% |
| Aug-25 | 2846 | 4030 | 25596 | 70.6% | 11.1% | 15.7% |
| Sep-25 | 4023 | 4599 | 34037 | 87.5% | 11.8% | 13.5% |
| Oct-25 | 4369 | 4863 | 24140 | 89.8% | 18.1% | 20.1% |
| Total | 22794 | 34859 | 183500 | 65.4% | 12.4% | 19.0% |