“COINS – the Combined On-line Information System – is used by the Treasury to collect financial data from across the public sector to support fiscal management, the production of Parliamentary Supply Estimates and public expenditure statistics, the preparation of Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) and to meet data requirements of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Up to nine years of data can be actively maintained – five historic (or outturn) years, the current year and up to three future (or plan) years depending on the timing of the latest spending review. COINS is a consolidation system rather than an accounts application, and so it does not hold details of individual financial transactions by departments…COINS contains millions of rows of data; as a consequence the files are large and the data held within the files complex. Using these download files will require some degree of technical competence and expertise in handling and manipulating large volumes of data. As such it is likely that this data will be most easily used by organisations that have such expertise, rather than individuals. More directly useful and accessible datasets that draw on the contents of the COINS database will be made available by August 2010.”