What your organisation needs to have in place and when.
The Procurement Act 2023 has introduced new payment reporting obligations that apply to every contracting authority. The first official Payment Compliance Notice is due by 30 April 2026, covering the reporting period from 24 February 2025 to 31 March 2026. For many public sector organisations, this is a completely new compliance requirement that cuts across procurement, finance, and audit functions.
The reporting requirement isn’t complicated in principle. Contracting authorities must publish information about their payment performance on qualifying regulated contracts, demonstrating whether they’re paying suppliers within the terms agreed. But in practice, getting the data right is harder than it sounds. Payment data sits in finance systems that weren’t designed for this type of reporting. Invoice receipt dates, which the Act uses as the starting point for measuring payment performance, aren’t always recorded consistently. Exemptions need to be applied correctly and documented clearly. And the difference between a Payments Compliance Notice and a Contract Payment Notice isn’t immediately obvious to teams encountering these requirements for the first time.
For NHS trusts managing hundreds of supplier relationships across estates and facilities, for multi-academy trusts processing invoices from contractors across dispersed school sites, for local authorities handling the highest volume of supplier transactions in the public sector, and for any organisation where finance and procurement don’t always have shared visibility of the same data, getting payment reporting right requires coordination across teams and systems that don’t naturally talk to each other.
This eBook gives finance, procurement, and audit teams a practical, structured approach to meeting the requirement. It was written for people who need to implement this, not for people who need a summary of what the legislation says.
What’s in the eBook
Five practical tips for getting your payment reporting right. Not theory, but specific actions that address the most common issues organisations face when preparing for their first Payment Compliance Notice. Based on what we’ve seen across the public sector organisations we work with.
A nine-point compliance checklist. A structured list of everything you need to have in place before your first notice is due: data definitions agreed, systems configured, exemption criteria documented, sign-off processes established, and reporting tested.
Invoice receipt dates explained. The Act uses the date an invoice is received as the starting point for measuring payment performance. That sounds simple, but in organisations where invoices arrive through multiple channels (email, post, portals, via contract administrators), establishing a single, consistent, defensible receipt date is one of the biggest practical challenges. The eBook covers how to establish your “single source of truth.”
Exemptions and how to apply them correctly. Not all invoices count towards your payment performance reporting. The eBook explains which exemptions are available, how to document them, and how to maintain an audit trail that demonstrates your exemptions are applied properly rather than used to disguise poor payment performance.
System integration and data requirements. What your finance and procurement systems need to capture, how to ensure the data flows correctly between them, and what to do if your current systems weren’t designed for this type of reporting.
The difference between Payments Compliance Notices and Contract Payment Notices. These are two distinct reporting requirements under the Act and they’re easy to confuse. The eBook explains what each one covers, who needs to produce them, and when they’re due.
Who this eBook is for
This eBook is for finance directors, procurement managers, accounts payable leads, and audit professionals in any UK public sector organisation that needs to meet the Procurement Act 2023’s payment reporting requirements. If you’re responsible for ensuring your organisation pays suppliers on time, reports on that performance accurately, and can demonstrate compliance to auditors and regulators, this eBook is written for you.
It’s particularly relevant for organisations where payment data is fragmented across multiple systems, where invoice processing involves several teams or departments, or where the coordination between finance and procurement hasn’t yet been formalised around these new requirements. Whether you’re in an NHS trust, a multi-academy trust, a local authority, a blue light service, or a central government department, the obligations are the same and the practical challenges are similar.
In Summary
The first Payment Compliance Notice deadline of 30 April 2026 isn’t far away. If your organisation hasn’t started preparing, this eBook gives you a structured way to get there. If you’ve started but aren’t confident everything is in place, the nine-point checklist will help you identify gaps. Download it, share it with your finance and procurement teams, and if you need hands-on support with system configuration, process design, or compliance assurance, Inprova’s consultancy team can help. Inprova pays 100% of its own suppliers within 30 days, every month, without exception. We practise what this eBook covers.
Frequently asked questions
A Payment Compliance Notice is a new reporting requirement introduced by the Procurement Act 2023. Every contracting authority must publish information about its payment performance on qualifying regulated contracts, demonstrating whether suppliers are being paid within the terms agreed in the contract. The first notice covers the period from 24 February 2025 (when the Act came into force) to 31 March 2026, and must be published by 30 April 2026. Subsequent notices follow an annual cycle. The notice must include information about the percentage of invoices paid within the contract payment terms, the average number of days taken to make payments, and the amount of interest paid to suppliers for late payment. It’s published on the central digital platform and is publicly accessible, meaning your payment performance becomes a matter of public record. For public sector organisations that have historically managed payment performance as an internal metric, this level of public transparency is new and requires both the data infrastructure to produce accurate reports and the process discipline to ensure the underlying payment performance is defensible. The eBook covers the practical steps to get both right.
These are two separate reporting requirements under the Procurement Act 2023, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes organisations make when preparing for compliance. A Payments Compliance Notice is an organisation-level report covering your overall payment performance across all qualifying regulated contracts. It’s published annually and shows how well your organisation pays its suppliers as a whole. A Contract Payment Notice is a contract-level report that must be published for individual contracts above £5 million in value. It covers the payment performance on that specific contract, including whether payments were made within terms and any interest paid for late payment. The two notices serve different purposes. The Payments Compliance Notice gives a public, aggregate picture of your organisation’s payment culture. The Contract Payment Notice gives contract-specific transparency that holds both the contracting authority and the supplier to account on individual high-value agreements. Your finance and procurement teams need to understand which contracts trigger a Contract Payment Notice, what data needs to be captured at contract level, and how the two reporting requirements interact. The eBook explains both requirements in practical terms with clear guidance on what needs producing, when, and by whom.
This is one of the most practically challenging aspects of the new payment reporting requirements. The Procurement Act uses the date an invoice is received as the starting point for measuring whether payment was made within the contracted terms. In theory, that’s straightforward. In practice, invoices arrive through multiple channels: email to different people, post to different addresses, uploaded to procurement portals, submitted through contract administrators, or sent directly to accounts payable. If your organisation doesn’t have a consistent, documented definition of when an invoice is “received,” your payment performance data will be unreliable and potentially indefensible under scrutiny. The eBook recommends establishing a “single source of truth” for invoice receipt dates and explains how to implement this practically. This typically means defining a single point of entry (whether that’s an accounts payable inbox, a procurement portal, or a finance system timestamp), communicating that definition across the organisation so everyone who handles invoices understands it, and configuring your systems to capture the receipt date consistently. For organisations using Quantum, invoice data is already structured and timestamped within the platform, which provides a reliable foundation for payment reporting.
The Procurement Act 2023 makes payment performance a matter of public record. If your Payments Compliance Notice shows that a significant proportion of invoices are being paid late, that information is visible to suppliers, auditors, regulators, and the public. The reputational risk alone is significant, particularly for public sector organisations that are expected to demonstrate responsible use of public money and fair treatment of their supply chain. Beyond reputation, poor payment performance affects your supply chain directly. Suppliers who aren’t paid on time face cash flow pressure that can affect their ability to deliver, particularly SMEs who don’t have the financial reserves to absorb delayed payments. The government’s emphasis on SME access and fair treatment of the supply chain under the National Procurement Policy Statement makes poor payment performance politically as well as commercially sensitive. There are also practical consequences. Suppliers can charge statutory interest on late payments. Persistent poor performance may affect your ability to attract competitive bids, as suppliers factor payment risk into their pricing or choose not to bid at all. For organisations that procure through Inprova’s frameworks and DPS, Quantum’s invoice processing and payment tracking provides the visibility to identify and address payment delays before they compound into a compliance problem.
