Every English council must publish every payment it makes over £500 — the raw chequebook. This variable simply counts how many such payments each council makes per month. It matters as a sanity check and a denominator: it shows whether a council's publication is complete and consistent month to month, and lets big spend totals be read alongside how many individual payments produced them.
| name | transaction_count |
|---|---|
| dataset | 11-transparency-code-spend |
| kind | constructed |
| type | integer |
| unit | count |
| grain | council-month |
| role | denominator |
| source | row count per council-month after schema normalisation |
| period | per council-month |
| missingness | Requires schema normalisation (including per-file header-row detection for Sefton); three-council sample only. Counts reflect each council's coverage exclusions and £500 reporting threshold behaviour, so they are comparable only with those caveats documented. |
| score_note | Easy disclosure-volume denominator; near-duplicate role to monthly_spend_total. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The number of published transactions per council-month, the companion denominator to monthly_spend_total (e.g. for duplicate-candidate rates). It indicates disclosure volume and ledger granularity rather than activity, since councils differ in what they exclude and how they aggregate invoices. Comparisons must carry the same coverage caveats as the spend total.