I confirm that Ordnance Survey does hold some of the information you have requested. Where the information is not held, or is exempt from disclosure, this is stated.
Taking each request in turn, I confirm the following:
Date invoice received
We are unable to confirm or deny whether this information is held under section 12(2) as to do so would in itself exceed the costs limit. Please see our comments below under Section 12 Costs limit exceeded.
Invoice due date:
Some of this information is held. Where the information is held it has been added to the Further information on late payments spreadsheet.xlsx in column H.
Where we have recorded “NA” in column H, we are unable to confirm or deny whether this information is held under section 12(2) as to do so would in itself exceed the costs limit. Please see our comments below under Section 12 Costs limit exceeded.
Invoice approved date:
This information is held, however, we are unable to provide this information as it would exceed the costs limit. Please see our comments below under Section 12 Costs limit exceeded.
Invoice payment terms:
This information is held and has been added to column G in the Further information on late payments spreadsheet.xlsx Please note “ZO” which appears in front of the payment term days is an internal code, which pulled across when we extracted the data.
Invoice query/dispute flag (e.g. Y/N):
This information is not held.
Reason for invoice query/dispute/delay:
This information is not held.
Section 12 Freedom of Information Act Costs limit exceeded
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which is set at £450.00 (18 hours).
Date invoice received
Invoices are received across the whole of the organisation and processed by many members of staff. We do not record when these invoices are received in our system. It is not information we require. It would be a time consuming, manual exercise to try and trace every single invoice (2314) back to the appropriate member of staff to see whether they still have this information within their inboxes.
Invoice due date:
We do not have a simple way to search and confirm whether we hold the invoice due date information, for the invoices identified in the spreadsheet at column H and marked “NA”. These invoices were processed outside our current system, potentially via journaling. We would need to search for each individual invoice to manually check if the due date is recorded and retrieve that information. There are 730 invoices in total and allowing an estimate of 5 minutes per invoice, such a search would take 61.23 hours of staff time to ascertain whether we hold the information and pull the data, which would exceed the costs limit set out in S12.
Invoice approved date:
In order to obtain the invoice approved date, we would need to find each individual invoice and then find the corresponding Purchase Order to establish the date it was receipted, then check the date on the receipt. This will involve using multiple screens with several different systems. We cannot pull a report which links all the relevant information. There are 2314 invoices to check and allowing an estimate of approximately 5 minutes per invoice, that means around 193.23 hours of staff time, to search and extract the information, which would exceed the costs limit of S12.
It is clear that the time spent dealing with the request for the invoice received date, the remaining invoice due dates, and the invoice approved date would exceed the costs limit, as explained above, and we are therefore unable to process your request further.
No public interest test is required.
Advice and Assistance
Under Section 16 of FOIA the duty to provide information and assistance. We have considered whether we could comply with your request by reducing the timescale to 2024-2025 but we do not consider this would bring the request within the costs limit identified above. If we focus on 2024-2025 only, we have 751 invoices. 79 invoice due dates are marked as “NA” meaning 33.31 hours of staff time to locate and extract the due date, and 751 invoices to search and extract the date approved, meaning 62.58 hours of staff time. We are unfortunately, unable to offer any additional meaningful advice and assistance to help bring your request within the costs limit at section 12 of the FOIA.