COLLECT

COLLECT is the first step towards actionable intelligence

Collection is the first key step in the process of transforming your spend and vendor data into actionable intelligence that is complete, accurate and fit-for-purpose.

Rapid collection with minimal effort

To support timely collection of the raw financial data with minimum effort on your part we provide you with a documented data extraction specification and practical advice, guidance and support designed specifically to ensure that your raw payables, purchase order or purchase card data is accurately extracted.

Getting it right from the outset

Getting it right at collection stage of the process directly impacts the quality, robustness and reliability of the end result which us why we pay particular attention to ensuring that the extracted data is scrutinised for errors, omissions and other anomalies.

Extensive and highly specialised experience

We have processed 1,000's of public sector datasets and the benefit of that experience has been captured in the proprietary technology developed to manage the data transformation process.

Advanced process management infrastructure

A critical component of our process management infrastructure is an application referred to internally as Sequence. Sequence uses advanced data management techniques to isolate and analyse hundreds of errors and issues with the delivered data.

Some of the more common issues identified by Sequence include:

• More than one vendor name exists for the same vendor key
• Vendor records exist with no vendor name
• Transactions exist with no related vendor records
• The same postcode is repeated in ten or more vendor addresses
• Incidences of duplicate net spend rows exist in transactions
• Included out of scope spend
• More than 12 months of spending were found in transactions
• High probability of payments to individuals

Rapid resolution of critical errors and omissions

One of the numerous outputs generated by Sequence is the Data Fitness Report that explains the impact and location of each error or omission so that they can be quickly resolved. Sign-off of the Data Fitness Report is an important milestone in the data transformation process as from that point forward there is no call on your staff until the data transformation process is complete and we're ready to deploy the Observatory.