Contracts and money
Purchase orders, invoices and paying by card
Where your purchase order number goes, what reaches the council's ledger, and what a card payment changes.
On this page
Most schools are invoiced. This page is about where your purchase order number goes, what reaches City Council's ledger, and what changes if you pay by card.
Your purchase order number
You give it at checkout, or when accepting a quote or a proposal. It is stored against the order, travels with each line into the file City Council sends to its finance system, and appears on the invoice.
Giving it at the point of ordering is much easier than adding it afterwards. If you did miss it, a System Admin at City Council can put it on the order before the finance run — ask in the help bubble with the order reference.
What reaches the ledger
Order lines are gathered into a batch and sent to City Council's finance system on its own schedule. Each line carries its own reference, your customer code, the cost coding and the transaction type, and the invoice is produced there rather than here.
So a day or two between ordering and an invoice appearing is normal. The order is confirmed either way: nothing waits on the finance run.
The customer code
Your school's code in City Council's ledger is held here and is not editable by the school, because it is what decides which account the money goes to. It is one of the three fields on your school's details that stay the council's. See your school's own record.
Paying by card
Where City Council has enabled it, an order carries a Pay button. Card payment is useful for a one-off that would otherwise take a purchase order and three signatures.
A settled card payment is excluded from the invoice run, so you are never billed for something you have already paid for. That exclusion happens when the payment settles rather than when it is started, which is why an order can briefly show as paid-and-pending.
Getting an invoice corrected
Corrections are made with a credit note rather than by deleting the order. The accounts have to keep saying what happened, so the record is that a thing was invoiced and then credited, not that it never occurred.
Ask in the help bubble with the order reference and what is wrong with it. The credit and the corrected line go out in the next run.
Where to look for what
- Orders: everything placed, with references and purchase order numbers.
- Contracts: what you currently hold.
- Your dashboard: what has been spent this year, at a glance.
- Activity: who did what, exportable as a spreadsheet.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.