Finance workstream
Quantities are measured. Prices are not.
Every payment and every revenue line on the Finance list is a quantity multiplied by a price. This platform measures the quantities — miles operated, journeys run, journeys missed, punctuality delivered — nightly, per service, from real vehicles. It holds no prices at all.
Reading the platform…
The list
Each requirement on the Finance list bundles several distinct asks — contract and operator performance alone contains penalties, disputes and maintenance schedules, which have three different answers. So each is broken into its parts, and it is the part that carries a status. A requirement is never marked better than its worst part.
Asked three ways over
Almost every line of the Finance list wants the same measure compared three ways. The comparison is a separate problem from the measure, and it has a separate answer — so it is answered once here rather than repeated into every row.
The before-and-after comparison is the one with a deadline. A measure with no baseline recorded before a service is franchised can never be compared across the change — bus data is not archived nationally, and what was not captured on the day is gone. Punctuality, reliability and mileage have been accumulating since recording started. Revenue, fares and patronage have not started at all, and every day before those feeds are procured is a day of baseline that cannot be bought back.
What a service payment is made of
The period payment is
ISPp − CRp−1
+ ICCAp−1 − IPAp−2 + MPA.
Two of its five terms move with what the buses actually did, and those
are the two this platform measures. The rest are contract documents.
| Term | What it is | Status | Against this platform |
|---|
The half that already runs, by service
Measured from the vehicles themselves, not from the timetable: the journeys a bus was seen working, the distance between the stops it was seen at, and the time it took, dwell included. Every operator in the area is here, franchised or not, on the same basis — which is the non-franchised comparison the list asks for, already in place.
| Service | Operator | Journeys | Miles | On road | Hours | On time |
|---|
What to procure, in the order it pays back
Costs nothing but a document
The performance regime's thresholds and rates. Every measurement it acts on is already computed nightly, per operator and per service. Handing the platform the regime turns penalties from a spreadsheet exercise into a nightly figure, with no feed, no supplier and no procurement.
Road geometry for mileage is the same shape of job: the data is in the feed already, it needs importing rather than buying.
Needs buying, and needs buying early
Ticketing and passenger counting. These are the whole of revenue, fares, patronage and apportionment — four of the five requirements on this list — and none of them can be approximated from bus location data. That was measured, not assumed: of 922 live vehicles, two carried an occupancy value, and nationally the field is a hardcoded constant.
Buying them for Day 1 gives no before-and-after comparison. Buying them before Day 1 does. That is the whole of the argument.