Connected to the payment database.
The council finder now reads the loaded national database. Choose a council and financial year to see its published payment totals, recorded suppliers and dated entries. The browser shows 50 records per page, with links to individual normalized records.
It is a live connection to a loaded dataset, not a live feed from councils. Coverage varies. Councils with no loaded records are distinguished from temporary connection failures; neither is treated as zero spending.
Dates, amounts and source references.
Financial years are derived from transaction dates: 1 April through 31 March. Undated entries are excluded from year views and dated browsing. The all-dates view uses a saved loaded-record count and does not claim a harmonised monetary total. Empty amounts are not replaced by zero. Automated changes are withheld when months, amounts, currency or net/gross basis cannot be compared.
Database receipts show a retained filename and source row number where available. The compact database does not retain original worksheet names or raw row payloads. Source links open a council publication collection, not a verified direct download of every named file. Match the filename and period before using a row reference.
The earlier source-checked Preston feature.
The agency-staff article and its twelve selected source-linked receipts remain available as a checked feature, separate from live database receipts. Its 2025/26 scope is 8,833 entries, totalling £46,593,928.13, with 1,152 recorded supplier names and records from all 12 months.
Comparing the years.
2024/25 contains 8,183 published entries totalling £42,631,859.50. The difference is £3,962,068.63, or 9.3%. Both years contain records from all twelve months.
We sum published amounts using payment dates from 1 April through 31 March. For agency staff and consultancy comparisons, we additionally match the exact published expense label. We do not treat missing months as zero or infer a household cost.
The limits matter.
- Published payments. They can include grants, capital payments and balance-sheet entries.
- Imported date outliers exist. Dates before 1990 or after today are not used to choose default financial years. They remain unchanged and visible in the all-dates records; we have not guessed corrected dates.
- All months represented does not mean every payment is included. Publication practices can vary.
- Net or gross is not consistently stated. Amounts are reproduced as published.
- Supplier names are recorded names. We have not merged them into verified corporate groups.
- A big payment is not proof of waste. These files do not establish value for money, motive or procurement compliance.
- Personal redactions stay redacted. We do not try to identify recipients the council has protected.
Original files for the twelve checked Preston entries.
These earlier, source-checked receipt pages include matched spreadsheet, sheet, row and transaction references. They should not be confused with the newer database receipts, whose source fields are more limited. Some normalized links pointed to a different month; the links below were matched to the named files in the discovery record.
Questions, not conclusions.
These figures are a starting point for scrutiny. Questions about the reasons for a payment or the value delivered need the council’s explanation and supporting contracts, invoices or decisions—not an inference from a large number.
Data attribution.
Each council page links to its publication collection; consult that source for its licensing and publication terms. The checked Preston feature uses Spending over £250, Preston City Council, 2024/25 and 2025/26, licensed under the Open Government Licence. This site is independent of the councils.