The data in this application comes from the two 'Active Contracts' reports created by the Procurement Department every month, or every two or three months. This application gives you ways to find contracts without reading through the report's PDF files. A given month's reports are usually available from five to eight weeks after the end of the month. So, for example, if a report is done for September, it will usually be available in the second to fourth week of November.
The accuracy of the data being displayed in this appliction cannot be guaranteed because the Procurement Department publishes the monthly reports as PDF files and interpreting data inside PDF files can be error-prone and cannot be guaranteed to be correct. That being said, some problems with the data have been fixed and referential integrity checks have been run. If you have any questions about this data, please verify the contract information with the source PDF files, found at the Procurement Department's Active Contracts page. If you find anything you feel to be in error, please report this to the contact below.
Be aware that the 'Total Cost' of a contract refers to the total money committed in all the years betweem the contract's "Effective Date" and "Expiration Date". These numbers do not reflect any single year's spending, but the total cost of a contract over its entire lifetime. Also be aware that the cost of a contract for the current year is calculated from the start and end dates of the contract, dividing the total cost by the number of days in the contract period and multiplying the number of days in the current year. The reality is that any proportion of a contract's cost may be disbursed at any time, based on the contract. There may be public information about when money for a contract has been actually disbursed, but that information is not included here.
Also, some data may look as though the end has been cut off. That is because the reports have been generated or processed by a system (unknown) that has length-limited fields and, indeed, data at the end of some strings has been cut off in the generation of the reports. Attempts to determine the full and proper names of the various entities have been made. However, to verify the name of, for example, a vendor, one should verify the data in the PDF files on the Procurement Department's servers. If an entity has been misidentified, please report this via the contact below.
A vendor's page may also include other information below the vendor's contract list, such as the California Secretary of State's Registration Number for the vendor's corporation or the URL at which one can find a corporation's information at the US Securities and Exchange Commission. An attempt is thus being made to better identify the vendors receiving contracts from the County. This is a work in progress. There is no definitive public database of corporations in the United States. Existing public databases are incomplete and some identifying information, such as a DUNS number, may be from a private source and not usable for purposes not allowed by the licensee of that information.
Feel free to use the contact information below if you have any questions or suggestions.
Contact: ray { at } ganymede { dot } org