Protecting the public purse

Skip to content

Audit Commission

Audit Commission > National Fraud Initiative > Private sector > Data requirements – Private Sector > Data format

Data format

Data should be extracted in the following formats:

Data

ASCII (preferred) or EBCDIC characters in fixed length or text delimited files. Common delimiters are comma (,), inverted comma (), pipe (|) or tilde (~). Text qualifiers should also be used.

Date fields

ddmmyyyy (preferred, but ddmmyy acceptable). If a date separator is used, it can be either a forward slash ( / ) or a hyphen ( – ).

Numeric fields

Numeric characters without a sign, or decimal point (for example, 123.45 as 12345). The use of binary fields should be avoided. If monetary values cannot be supplied these should be space filled (as for blank fields below). Please do not insert a zero.

Character fields

If a field type is neither a date nor numeric (ie, alpha numeric) this is referred to as a ‘character’ field for the purposes of this exercise, ie, fields such as ‘VAT registration number’, ‘suppliers invoice number’ that are a combination of letters and numbers.

Blank fields

Should be space filled for fixed-length records. For Comma separated variable (CSV) records, the blank field must still be represented by a delimiter.

Excel

There are a number of reasons why you should not export data into Excel, some of the more common reasons are listed below:

  • Numeric strings of 16 digits or more are treated as numbers by default and only the first 15 significant figures are stored.
  • Leading zeros are removed from numeric strings, try typing ’01062007′ into a cell. This is a very common problem which can affect dates, invoice numbers, bank details etc.
  • Excel will automatically transform anything that looks like a date, however remotely, into a date. This causes problems with bank sort codes using hyphens (e.g. ’21-11-97′ ) and house numbers if they are supplied in a different column to the street name (i.e. ’05-07′).

Fixed length or character delimited records (e.g. CSV) are acceptable. If commas ( , ) or inverted commas (‘ ‘) appear within any of the data fields, a pipe ( | ) should be used as a field delimiter instead of the conventional comma.

Data should only be submitted using the Data File Upload (DFU) facility within the NFI secure web site. This is now the only acceptable method to supply data. If another submission method is used our policy will be to inform the Director of Finance that data have been put data at risk unnecessarily.