Public Sector & Local Authorities: Managing Procurement

Today, public procurement officers face three demands that feed each other. The first is traceability, set by the Public Procurement Code and legality checks. The second is digitalisation, driven by the rollout of the Public Invoicing Portal. The third is accountability, rooted in sustainable development policies and the 2021 Climate and Resilience Act. On the ground, this means more documents, more approval steps and more file formats. Yet the staff and resources to manage them have not grown.

The local authorities and public bodies we work with (including major public-service accounts) all see the same thing. Specialist tools exist for accounting, decision support and contract management. But the operational spending layer (purchase cards, staff travel, small purchases) is still spread across several providers. This is exactly where a single tool like the Greenway multi-network card makes things clearer.

Responsible public procurement is often seen as a mere suggestion. That misreads the law. Article L3-1 of the Public Procurement Code states that "public procurement contributes to achieving sustainable development goals in their economic, social and environmental dimensions"^[1].

Article L2112-2, which comes from the 2015 ordinance, goes further. Procurement officers are required to include social and environmental performance conditions in contract execution clauses^[2]. The Climate and Resilience Act made this stronger. It gave environmental criteria more weight when bids are assessed.

In practice, any procurement setup must produce data that proves these goals are met. This is where the gap appears. Most organisations have the right clauses in their specifications. But they struggle to measure the real impact of day-to-day spending. Our approach follows our guide to sustainable finance and the corporate card for CSR. When spending data is structured at source, it becomes a steering tool for responsible public procurement.

Digital invoices are nothing new for the public sector. Since 1 January 2017, suppliers to the State, local authorities and public bodies must send invoices electronically through Chorus Pro. The platform is run by the Agency for Government Financial Information Technology (AIFE)^[3]. The invoice must show the SIRET number of the public body that receives it. It is then matched against the purchase order and the contract.

The September 2026 deadline changes the scale completely. B2B e-invoicing becomes universal. Chorus Pro turns into the Public Invoicing Portal (PPF), the single entry point for both B2B and B2G flows^[4][5].

For a local authority, the task is no longer just to receive structured invoices. The real challenge is making the upstream chain reliable: clean purchase orders, accurate analytical coding, automatic matching. Our white paper on e-invoicing and procurement covers this in practical detail.

Below the competitive tendering threshold, small purchases and mission expenses create many transactions. Neither contracts nor Chorus Pro handle them well. This is where the public-sector purchase card comes in. It is a controlled, capped means of payment held by a named cardholder. Its data flows automatically into the accounting system. For a finance directorate, the benefit is threefold: no more cash advances, per-agent traceability, and fewer low-value supplier invoices.

The card must fit into a consistent spend management framework, not add one more silo. Staff travel, mission costs and local purchases all gain from a single platform. Our white paper on expense and spend management explains this in detail. For the public sector, the specific challenge is to follow public accounting rules (M14 for municipalities, M52 for départements, M71 for regions). The analytical export must match the authorising officer's chart of accounts.

A public procurement officer who must show that their spending is responsible needs reliable data. The key is to structure spending at the point of payment, by analytical axis, category and supplier. This sets the quality of the reports shown to the municipal council, the assembly or the budget controller. It is also the basis of reliable CSR reporting, now expected even outside the strict scope of CSRD.

Greenway's 1%ForAll® programme follows the same logic. 1 % of every transaction goes to the Greenway Foundation, in a way that can be traced and measured. For a local authority, this is not a marketing argument. It is an impact budget line that fits easily into responsible public procurement reporting. It adds no cost and no admin work. This kind of mechanism turns routine spending into a steering indicator.

Most public bodies do better with a step-by-step approach than with a full overhaul. Start by mapping fragmentation. How many payment providers, expense workflows and supplier invoice formats exist side by side today? Then choose a unified platform for operational spending (purchase cards, mobility, expense reports) that feeds straight into public accounting. Finally, get ahead of PPF 2026 by tightening the upstream purchase-order process. Incoming e-invoices can only be matched automatically once this step is sound.

For responsible procurement, the work is less about clauses, which are usually in place already. It is more about measuring their effect. Take a system that tags each expense by impact category (sustainable mobility, local suppliers, social integration). It turns the yearly compliance review into a live dashboard. This extends our invoicing & procurement dossier and our expense management dossier to the specific context of the public sector.