Data quality, revisions and releases

Status flags

Every fiscal observation carries one of four statuses:

• final – the publisher has released the value as final;
• preliminary – the publisher has flagged the value as provisional;
• estimated – the value is a QinMetrics estimate, documented on the indicator's methodology page;
• revised – the value replaces an earlier published value, and the earlier value is retained in the release history.

Tenders and contracts carry the status codelists of the Open Contracting Data Standard. Payments carry a status of scheduled, paid, partially paid, overdue or cancelled.

No silent changes

Published values are never edited in place. A change in a value is a new release of its dataset, with the change described in the release notes. The previous release remains available, so a citation to a version continues to resolve to the values it cited.

Releases

A release is a dated, versioned snapshot of a dataset. Each release page states:

• the version and release date;
• the number of records of each type;
• the files provided, with sizes and SHA-256 checksums;
• what changed since the previous release.

Known limitations

Every dataset page has a Known limitations section, written before the first release and updated with each one. It covers coverage gaps, fields that sources publish inconsistently, entity-resolution rules and their known failure modes, and any step where QinMetrics had to choose between conflicting sources.

Entity resolution

Organisations and jurisdictions appear under different names in different sources. Matching them into one record is documented per dataset: which identifiers were used, which name-matching rules were applied, and how ambiguous cases were handled. Unresolved matches are left as separate records rather than merged on a guess.

Currencies and units

Amounts are stored in the currency the source states. The platform does not convert currencies at ingestion; conversions, deflators and per-capita adjustments are analytical steps, performed with stated rates and documented on the page that presents them. Indicator units are stated on every indicator page and in every export.