This item has been moved to the '2.02 Decimal Upgrade Proposals' forum for inclusion the upcoming decimal upgrade.

I support the idea of including a total-expenditure element to the Organisation Standard. I would replicate the entire total-budget complex element, replacing budget-line with expense-line. We would then have an element which allows for specifying the period covered by the financial year and a flexible breakdown of the total into overheads/operations/etc without being prescriptive.

This proposal has been discussed amongst the IATI Technical Team following the end of the initial suggestion phase of the v2.02 upgrade.

The IATI Technical Team supports this proposal and highlight that this is similar in part to the proposal: IATI Org standard for UN System Reporting. We invite further discussion on the practical implementations before a final decision on inclusion within v2.02 is made. 

Agree as long as there is also a provision of an attribute which describes what the total-budget and total-expenditure refers to: for example, for NGOs  this would be total budget/expenditure related to international development projects rather than total organisation budget/expenditure. (Organisations such as British Red Cross have a large spend in the UK which is not international development spend). 

Please see below for the technical implementation that is suggested in the Version 2.02 - Formal Proposal:

New element: total-expenditure

• Add a new element to the organisation standard: total-expenditure

• Proposed example
  <total-expenditure>
    <period-start iso-date="2014-01-01" />
    <period-end iso-date="2014-12-31" />
    <value currency="USD" value-date="2014-01-01">250000000</value>
    <expense-line ref="1234">
      <value currency="USD" value-date="2014-01-01">200000000</value>
      <narrative xml:lang="en">Expense Line</narrative>
    </expense-line>
   </total-expenditure>

• Add definitions:

• total-expenditure: ‘The total-expenditure element allows for the reporting of the organisation’s international development expenditure. The recommendation is that, where and when possible, the organisation’s total expenditure for each of the past three years is reported. The expense line allows publishers to record further breakdown.’

• [Further documentation and guidance will be added for each of the child elements & their attributes: period-start, value and expense-line in accordance with the elements & attributes that form part of total-budget.]

• See the proposed v2.02 summary table spreadsheet for full proposed changes.

Total expenditures may have different definitions/meanings for publishers. It would be important to add an attribute to qualify the nature of the amount.  For example, some donors may have more than development-related expenditures or, within what they consider development, a portion might not align with the ODA definition.  Therefore, we would strongly recommend adding attributes to qualify the information and, for publishers that wish to share more details, include a “99-reporting organisation” code, where narrative would be possible, but still coded.

How are other publishers interpreting this element?

Hi Jeremie, thank you for this. The IATI Technical Team would like to point out that for now we have included an expense-line element, which will allows a publisher to specify a breakdown of the elements of their total budget - including the currency, value-date, reference, and a narrative. In this way, an expense-line element could be used to mark out the development-specific, or ODA-defined amounts of the total budget. (Please see above for a full specification of the proposed element.)

It’s also worth considering that the development of a codelist for total expenditure type would take a fair amount of consultation to devise. We would hope to explore this possibility in the future, but at the moment it is outside of the scope of this upgrade.

This proposal has been added as a GitHub issue, for inclusion in the version 2.02 development branch of the IATI-Schemas: https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Schemas/issues/284

This proposal has now been incorporated into a version 2.02 code repositories (see the above GitHub issue link for technical details). The relevant page on a development version of the 2.02 reference and documentation site is available to view here.

We welcome scrutiny on the implementation of this proposal and encourage the community to feedback and suggest solutions for any errors, omissions and problems. This should be done before Monday 7 December, when the process will commence to release version 2.02 as a live version of the IATI Standard. More information on the inspection phase is available here.