Payments for goods and services

1 How payments are made

West Sussex County Council (WSCC) normally pays suppliers within 30 days of receipt of the invoice, except when an invoice is in dispute.

Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) vendors are companies that fulfil two of the following criteria:

• a turnover of not more than £11.2 million
• a balance sheet total of no more than £5.6 million
• no more than 250 employees.

We currently pay all SMEs based within West Sussex within 20 days from receipt of invoice, except when an invoice is in dispute.

Once payment has been made a remittance advice is issued to the supplier. This contains a number beginning with a ‘9’, so you will know the payment has been made by us. 

If the remittance number does not begin with a ‘9’, the payment will not have been made by WSCC.

If you have not received a remittance advice, or do not know what a payment is for, email our helpdesk. We will confirm the email or postal address we have on our supplier database. If this is not correct we will advise you how to change your supplier details as we can only send remittance advice to the address shown on your supplier record.

2 P Cards

Purchasing, or P Cards, are an established, well-recognised and simple-to-use form of payment.

The P Card supplier for West Sussex County Council (WSCC) is Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which supplies a charge card (not a credit card) that looks similar to the familiar personal debit or credit cards.

P Cards use ‘chip and pin’ technology to validate transactions and have monthly and single transaction limits.

3 Embedded cards

Embedded cards are centrally-managed P Cards which are linked to a specific supplier, against which they can request payment for all goods and services.

Using an embedded card as a payment method is an alternative to the submission of invoices.

To be eligible for an embedded card a supplier must be:

• under contract to West Sussex County Council with appropriate controls and measures for the resolution of disputed delivery, quality and payment issues
• able to supply transaction data at Level 3 Line Item Detail (LID), which enables electronic receipt of supporting information, such as product details at line level and VAT breakdown.

Apply for an embedded card

Contact the person you regularly deal with at West Sussex County Council and ask them to contact our Procurement team.

A member of the team will contact you to discuss the possibility of purchasing using an embedded card. If this is agreed, a card will be embedded into your system and tested.

After successful testing we will provide you with a WSCC point of contact who will request goods or services against this embedded card.

Goods are ordered online or by phone by a WSCC employee and the transactions are downloaded in the next 24–48 hours into the Royal Bank of Scotland P Card system.

Suppliers receive payment within 4 working days via this method.

4 Terms and conditions

Below are the standard terms and conditions for the supply of goods and services.

5 Construction Industry Scheme

This Government-led scheme sets out the rules for how payments to subcontractors (such as building, glazing, landscaping, electrical or maintenance) are made.

Construction Industry Scheme payments for contractors must be handled by West Sussex County Council. This means they are taken at source before payment is made to suppliers, and passed directly to HM Revenue and Customs by us.