Spend Comparison Service

The service is comprised of 3 data collections:

• Purchase Order
• Purchase Order Validation
• Accounts Payable

The data gathered from the collections will be processed and displayed via analytics dashboards. The data is available to a variety of NHS procurement, finance and clinical users.

The analytical information will more effectively enable NHS Improvement to help providers reduce cost and improve the quality of their services.

The Spend Comparison Service will:

• help Integrated Care Systems to identify efficiency and collaborative opportunities
• help providers maximise their use of resources and become more efficient, as required by the provider licence
• help identify the relationship between patient characteristics and cost
• support an approach to benchmarking for regulatory purposes
• inform strategic programmes led by Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT), NHS Improvement and NHS Supply Chain
• inform NHS national aggregation initiatives such as Nationally Contracted Products

The Spend Comparison service, launched on 1 August 2019, replaces NHS Improvement’s Purchase Price Index and Benchmarking service (PPIB).

The PPIB tool was the first national data set of all provider purchase order data. It has been a huge success with more than 113 million purchase order lines uploaded from 245 different organisations across all provider sectors, enabling the comparison of £14 billion of NHS expenditure. 

Since its initial release, the PPIB has informed provider's daily purchasing decisions and contract negotiations. Further, it provides a source of intelligence:

• for regional cost saving plans
• for GIRFT
• when implementing a new operating model for the NHS procurement and supply chain management

All NHS trusts (acute, specialists, mental health, community and ambulance) are now required to upload their purchase order and accounts payable data each to NHS Digital Strategic Data Collections Service (SDCS). Purchase Order data is collected on a weekly basis and Account Payable data is collected on a monthly basis.

The NHS Spend Comparison user guide serves as a user guide for the NHS Spend Comparison Service. It offers an overview of how to gain access to the service, provides a basic understanding of how to navigate around the site and use the Tool, some examples of how to use the service to gain specific analysis or insights, and some useful tips to remember when using the Spend Comparison Tool.  

All NHS Improvement organised training events have now been delivered, however, if you do require additional training then please get in touch with the Procurement Programme team at NHS Improvement by e-mailing nhsi.procprogramme@nhs.net.

Details of arranged training events will appear here, when available to book.

If you have any specific queries about how to use the system, please log those with our National Service Desk at ssd.nationalservicedesk@nhs.net.

For data submission guidance go to the Strategic Data Collection Service webpage.

The use of the Spend Comparison Service is governed by the terms and conditions highlighted in the End User Access Agreement (EUAA).

For further information or support please contact our NHS National Service Desk.

Email: ssd.nationalservicedesk@nhs.net

Telephone: 0300 303 5035