City Purchase Agreements

What will you find here?

This dashboard displays approved dollar amounts of purchase agreements between the City and vendors. Purchase agreements are structured as either contracts or direct vouchers, and contracts are either blanket agreements or standard purchase orders. The different types of purchase agreement structures can be filtered at the top of the dashboard:

Direct vouchers – Payments for services or goods made separately from contracts. Each direct voucher corresponds to a single payment.
Contracts – Agreements to make payments for services or goods in the future when the services or goods are received.
- Blanket agreement contracts – Contracts to pay for services or goods on an ongoing, as-needed basis up to a set spending limit. The total amount paid over the course of a blanket agreement contract may be less than the spending limit.
- Standard purchase order contracts – Contracts to pay fixed amounts for services or goods. Payments are made throughout the course of a standard purchase order contract as parts of the contract are completed and invoiced.

Modifications made after initial approvals may increase or decrease the dollar value of a contract or direct voucher. Modifications are included in this dashboard as distinct agreement stages occurring separately from initial approvals. Dates of initial agreements and modifications in this dashboard are sourced from approval dates in the City’s Financial Management and Purchasing Systems (FMPS) database.

Contracts and direct vouchers are administered by three City departments, which can be filtered at the top of the dashboard:

Department of Procurement Services (DPS) administers contracts resulting from competitive bid processes and also administers certain direct vouchers such as payments for small purchases, payments for emergency purchases, and payments related to existing or planned contracts.
Department of Finance (DOF) administers contracts and direct vouchers for City Comptroller responsibilities, which include employee payroll, employee benefits, accounting, and financial reporting.
Office of Budget and Management (OBM) administers delegate agency contracts. Delegate agencies are vendors providing services or goods for which payments are funded by City-managed grants.

The data for contracts and direct vouchers also includes City departments ordering services or goods, broad categories of services or goods, and more detailed types of services or good within the categories.

Some questions that can be answered using data in this dashboard are:

Which vendor has received the largest total approved dollar amount across all contracts and direct vouchers since 2016?
Which City department accounted for the largest total approved dollar amount from direct vouchers last year?
How many different vendors have received purchase approvals so far this year?

Data sources

The data in the dashboard is sourced from the FMPS database and is shown as it appears in the database for each agreement. Vendor names, City departments, descriptions, categorizations, or other information may be incomplete, inconsistent, or uninformative for some records. Because the dashboard shows all modifications made to dollar amounts, an agreement may have an incorrect amount shown for some dates if the amount was incorrectly entered in FMPS on one date and corrected in FMPS on a later date.

DPS maintains a website describing the City’s procurement processes as well as Contract Search and Payment Search websites that provide some of the same data as in this dashboard. Additionally, the Chicago Data Portal provides contract data and payment data.

Data displayed in the dashboard is current as of the last updated date indicated in the dashboard.