A Contracts Finder row is a notice, not a paper

A Contracts Finder row is a notice. It records that a buyer published an opportunity, an award, or a similar record on that service. It is not the council minute that discussed the spend, and it is not the invoice that paid it. A payment line is a row in a spend file. A committee paper is a PDF from the body's papers page. Cite the one you have.

If this index has no spend file for a body, no spend file is held here. That is not proof the body paid nobody. The body may publish elsewhere, under a threshold, or in a format this pass did not take. Empty spend means no file. How to read public contracts and spend is that rule in full.

A notice can name a supplier. The name is what the notice printed. If it also prints a company number, the number attaches a company. The name alone does not. Do not invent the number from the brand. Two firms can share a word and not share a number.

NHS payment rows are their own files. They are not Contracts Finder and they are not board papers. The NHS desk keeps the split. Do not add NHSBSA rows to trust payment lines and call the sum one account. Do not add either of them to a contract notice.

A useful note has three lines when you have three files, and one line when you have one. Write the publisher on the line. A later reader should see the gap. Filling the gap with a likely supplier is how a briefing becomes unfair. Leave the supplier string in the words the file used.

Papers live on the Sources catalogue. Open the council for the minute. Open the notice for the notice. They can sit in the same story only after you have cited both. One does not stand in for the other.

Write the service name in the citation: Contracts Finder, a council spend file, or an NHS payment file. Those names stop a reader thinking you saw a contract deed. You saw a notice or a line. If the notice includes an award value, that value is the value on the notice, not a sum you reconciled to a ledger. Reconciliation is a further job, and only when the ledger exists. Until then the value stays inside the sentence about the notice. The same discipline applies to a zero. A body with no rows is a body with no rows here. Your first sentence should be able to survive if the second file never turns up. If it cannot, you have built the piece on a file you do not hold.

Thresholds cut the spend files. A file of payments over a published floor hides everything smaller. Describe the floor if you describe the file. 'No small payments appear' is a description of the file, not of the body. NHS files have their own floors and their own payer. Read the name of the file before you say the health service paid. You may be looking at one authority's extract.

A contract notice that names a winner is still a notice of an award published on that service. It is not the signed contract, unless the notice is the only document and you say so. Most of the time the signed contract is not in this index. Do not describe the notice as the contract. Describe it as the notice. Your reader can ask for the contract from the buyer. You will have told them what you actually held. That sentence is the one to keep when an editor asks for a shorter piece. Cut the colour. Keep the file type. A notice stays a notice in the short version too.