The vendor ledger

Everything here comes from Checkbook NYC, the New York City Comptroller's public spending transparency system, retrieved through its application programming interface in July 2026.

Two numbers appear throughout, and they mean different things:

• Registered value counts contract actions — new contracts, renewals, extensions, amendments and task orders — at the value recorded when each action was registered. A long-running relationship renewed yearly counts each renewal. This matches how the city itself reports annual procurement totals.
• Paid sums the money disbursed against each of those contract documents (Checkbook's spend-to-date). In the city's accounting a dollar is paid against exactly one contract document, so this number does not double-count.

Master agreements — citywide purchasing vehicles whose stated amounts are ceilings, not awards — are listed on vendor pages but excluded from registered-value totals.

How the city's award methods are grouped

Every contract records the method by which it was awarded. Checkbook shows this on each contract but never totals it. This ledger sorts the city's 63 raw award methods into six groups so competition can be measured in aggregate. The raw method is always shown on each contract action; the groups are an editorial classification, documented in full in the methodology:

• Competitive bid or proposal — sealed bidding, requests for proposals, multiple awards and pre-qualified competitive lists: awards where vendors competed openly.
• Small purchase or discretionary — below-threshold buys and borough- or council-discretionary funds.
• Sole source, emergency or negotiated — awards made without open competition.
• Renewal or extension — continuations of a prior award.
• Intergovernmental, utility or grant — arrangements outside competitive procurement by their nature.
• Other or unclassified — everything the keyword rules do not place.

M/WBE figures count only prime vendors the city certifies as minority-owned (Black, Asian, Hispanic or Native American) or women-owned. This is the M/WBE share of prime-contract dollars, not the city's overall M/WBE utilization rate — that measure includes subcontracting and is calculated differently. The recorded field also contains a large residual category, "Individuals and Others" ($54B citywide), and a separate non-minority Emerging Business Enterprise category; neither is counted here as M/WBE.

How this compares to Checkbook NYC. Checkbook NYC, the Comptroller's official site, is this ledger's sole source and goes deeper on some data it does not carry here — check-level payments, payroll, budget, revenue and subcontractors, updated daily. This ledger is built to do the things Checkbook cannot. Checkbook shows one fiscal year at a time from a dropdown; here a vendor or an agency's entire sixteen-year record — totals, trends, relationships and every action — sits on one page with a stable link. It groups spelling variants Checkbook treats as separate payees, shows registered value and actual payments side by side with plain definitions, and adds analysis Checkbook has no equivalent of: all-time vendor and agency rankings, vendor concentration over time, how competitively the city awards its money, the share going to M/WBE firms year by year and where the money goes by industry. Every agency and every vendor is a page; the two are cross-linked.

One data-quality note: vendor names arrive from the city's Financial Management System already truncated in some records (for example, "NEW YORK STATE ENERGY" is the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority). Truncated and full spellings can appear as separate vendors.

The full methodology, including every filter and known limitation, is in METHODOLOGY.md. The pipeline code is in the project repository.