Invoicing data relating to Social Security Scotland finance systems: FOI release

Information requested

Confirmation of which of the following fields are held within your finance systems, whether current or legacy, in respect of suppliers which were not paid within 30 days for the period starting 1 April 2019 to the date of this request:

1. Supplier Name
2. Invoice Date
3. Invoice Received Date
4. Invoice Due Date
5. Gross Invoice Value
6. Payment Date
7. Payment Terms
8. Late Payment Compensation or Interest Paid (if any)

Confirmation of which of these fields exist as structured, reportable data.

Clarification of whether reports or bulk exports exist containing these fields.

Confirmation of whether filtering by payment date, due date, or payment performance is possible using structured data.

A cost estimate based on the number of invoices falling within the scope of the request, together with a task-level breakdown explaining how that estimate has been calculated.

Response

Request for information (covering April 2019 to September 2024):

Invoicing data from April 2019 to September 2024 is held on a legacy system.

We hold data for fields 1 to 6, but not 7 or 8. We are unable to filter this data by payment performance.

As a result, every single invoice falls within scope of the request and would need to be checked to determine exact payment dates.

There were 38,809 invoices from April 2019 to March 2024 (not including further invoices from April 2024 to September 2024).

We are not required to comply with a request that would cost over £600. At a standard rate of £15 per hour this equates to 40 hours of work. To be cost compliant we would need to manually check an invoice every 3 seconds. Based on this, we are confident that the cost required to isolate the data set of invoices not paid within 30 days would be substantially over £600.

For more information and guidance on the FOISA Section 12 Excessive Cost of Compliance, please see:

Charging a fee or refusing to comply with a request on excessive cost grounds

Request for information (covering October 2024 onwards):

Our current system holds invoicing data from October 2024 onwards.

We hold data for fields 1 to 6, but not 7 or 8. We are able to filter this data by payment performance, including invoices that have not been paid within 30 days.

There are 615 invoices that fall within scope of your request from October 2024 to 17 February 2026. A small cost calculation exercise was carried out on five sample invoices, concluding that the cost to comply with a request of this scope would fall within the cost exemption value of £600.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.