Harkirat Singh / Analytics

02 / Excel & public spending

Buckinghamshire spending

A native Excel workbook for tracing published expenditure, investigating classifications and checking source exceptions.

Power QueryData ModelDAX

Where did reported
spending change?

Two years of published supplier and procurement-card reports. Publication month defines each comparison, rather than transaction-date completeness.

Start here Switch publication stream to compare supplier and procurement-card views. The streams remain separate.

Loading independently reconciled source aggregates…

Reported departments

Labels remain distinct; a blank department becomes Unallocated. Renamed departments are not silently merged.

Inspect every department value

Monthly publication cohort

Signed amounts, including negative entries. Procurement-card tax and gross remain distinct from net.

Inspect monthly amounts

These disclosure cohorts are not complete council expenditure. Supplier and card streams have unverified overlap and must never be added together. Published rows are not invoice or purchase counts.

Fixed worked example: supplier publications, 2025 vs 2024. Filters above do not change these figures.

A classification issue
changes the reading.

The most useful investigation begins by checking what a change actually represents.

£67.95mIncrease in signed supplier amounts, 2025 versus 2024
£62.99mIncrease in supplier amounts with blank departments
92.71%Share of overall growth accounted for by that blank-label increase
Finding → interpretation

Named departments explain only part of the change

The blank-department increase accounts for most of the overall signed growth. This identifies a classification problem for departmental interpretation. It does not establish a funding decision, a service cut or the cause of the missing classifications.

Before drawing departmental conclusions, an analyst should investigate the source coding and any boundary changes. The workbook leaves the original labels and Unallocated amounts visible.

Source corrections

Preserve the source; make the correction explicit

January and February 2025 supplier reports require verified date/document-column exchanges. One February source-total row exactly repeats the month's expenditure and is excluded from the analytical rows. Empty records and verified zero sentinels are classified separately.

All other signed expenditure records, including repeated-looking and negative rows, remain. The 89 card net-plus-tax versus gross differences are review flags, without invented corrections or misconduct claims.

The native Excel
workflow

Power Query, a relational Data Model, DAX measures, PivotCharts, slicers and detail tables. No macro, server or external runtime is needed to use the workbook.

  1. Open StartNavigate to Department Spending, Supplier Review, Card Review and Data Quality.
  2. Filter and inspectUse publication year and timeline filters. Supplier and card classifications remain separate. Model Views provides the chart values.
  3. Trace a recordUse the independent detail tables to search a source file, reported name or identifier. Detail-table filters do not follow the dashboard slicers.
  4. Refresh the fixed snapshotExtract the companion, set RawFolder to its data/raw directory, then Refresh All. Review query errors and Data Quality differences before saving.

Retained workbook preview

Unchanged v0.2 native Excel export. Open the image for full-size inspection.

Excel Department Spending sheet with 2025 selected, supplier department filters, monthly amounts and category comparisons. The browser tables above provide the figures.

The workbook retains its 29 September 2026 technical review. The portfolio package independently rechecked the 48 raw-file hashes, source calculations and selected aggregates. It did not repeat native Excel refresh or human keyboard/screen-reader acceptance.

Open it. Refresh it.
Check the result.

Use 64-bit Microsoft 365 Excel for Windows. Download the workbook and its companion to reproduce the native workflow.

Included

Native Excel workbook included. Use desktop Excel to inspect its model.

Software

Excel for Windows for the native workbook. Python companion for checks.

Full replay

Exact workbook available here; historical native acceptance remains unchanged.

Excel workbook

Unchanged v0.2 workbook with saved data, native controls and embedded instructions. Approximately 56 MB.

XLSX · 58.8 MB · verified before saving

Reproduction companion

All 48 original CSVs, source URLs and hashes, actual M definitions, retained baseline and a portable calculation checker.

Download companion ZIPZIP · 4.9 MB

Read setup guide

Optional calculation check

Python 3.11 or newer, standard library only. Recompute source controls and the browser tables without opening Excel.

python reproduce.py

Run from the extracted companion directory. This check does not automate Excel.