Navigating the Transactions List Page
Last updated
Procurement Data Crash Course
Last updated
Let's navigate to the last page of the dashboard called Transactions List.
Drags the drag the bottom scroll bar to the right and we will see more columns.
This is the most detailed dataset on procurement that we could find. The dataset includes buyer name, supplier name, item description, unit price, quantity, Unit of Measure, date of order, date of payment, order amount and payment amount.
The previous data sources such as E-tender rarely has these information on payment amount, not to say unit price and quantity.
By scraping the data, we know there are over 49000 orders on this transactions list.
Even though it still has a lot of issues, this gives us an idea of how a procurement dataset should look like.
Similar to other tables on this dashboard, clicking on the payments or order amount column will sort all orders by payments amounts.
After sorting them in descending order, we will see the order that has been paid most is an order from SA Police Service to Red Roses Africa worth about 500 Million Rand.
Remember at the beginning we mentioned the summary page is not complete?
This is an evidence. This order of 500 milllion is not shown on the "Top 10 payments to suppliers" chart.
Sort the transactions list by order amount, observe the item description. What is the most common item description?
By clicking on the Items drop down box and search "infrastructure", we could filter the table to only infrastructure items.
It seems a few departments made quite a lot of huge infrastructure orders.
If we are interested in these huge infrastructure orders and would like to analyze them, it would be hard to keep working with the dashboard. The dashboard doesn’t allow us to download the data, not even copy more than two cells from the data.
Here is when the tool come into play.