Background and Introduction

How we developed the Keep the Receipts

The Keepthereceipts tool was developed mid 2020 in response to COVID19 procurement.

The aim is to catalogue South African provincial and national government spending related to COVID-19 into a machine-readable, searchable format.

The first round of data was collected by OpenUp volunteers in collaboration with Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM).

The data was scraped from PDFs published by each department on the OCPO website. Here is the link to the PDFs. OCPO later hid this link and it’s no longer available from the front page of the website.

Another data source was provided by M&G (Mail and Guardian) tracker.

Towards Sep 2020, we from OpenUp scraped the last page — The transaction list of the COVID-19 dashboard from OCPO.

Earlier this year, when OCPO released the Diaster Response Dashboard, OpenUp also scarped this dashboard. This is the source of disaster response dataset on this KeeptheReceipts.

All these data is uploaded on the KeeptheReceipts tool.

How we update Keep the Receipt

The dashboard updates every one to two months. We scrap the dashboard at about the same frequency. The most recent scrap is from August 16.

There are currently over 49000 procurement records from the COVID19 dashboard, and about 550 records about disaster response dashaboard.