Public Sector & Local Authorities: Managing Procurement

Public procurement officers today sit at the intersection of three mutually reinforcing demands. First, traceability, governed by the Public Procurement Code and legality controls. Second, digitalisation, driven by the ramp-up of the Public Invoicing Portal. Third, accountability, embedded in sustainable development policies and the 2021 Climate and Resilience Act. On the ground, this translates into a proliferation of documents, approval workflows, and file formats, without a corresponding increase in management resources.

The local authorities and public-sector bodies we work with (including major public-service accounts) share the same observation : specialist tools for accounting, decision support, and contract management exist, but the operational spending layer (purchase cards, agent travel, small acquisitions) remains scattered across multiple providers. This is precisely the scope where a unified solution like the Greenway multi-network card brings real clarity.

Responsible public procurement is often treated as a mere recommendation. That is a misreading of 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, stemming 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 reinforced this by increasing the weight of environmental criteria in bid evaluation.

In practice, this means any procurement framework must produce data that demonstrates these considerations are being met. This is where the gap opens up: most organisations have the right clauses in their specifications, but struggle to measure the real impact of day-to-day spending. Our approach mirrors what we describe in our guide to sustainable finance and the corporate card for CSR: spending data, when structured at source, becomes a steering asset for responsible public procurement.

Invoice digitalisation is nothing new for the public sector. Since 1 January 2017, suppliers to the State, local authorities, and public bodies have been required to submit invoices electronically via Chorus Pro, operated by the Agency for Government Financial Information Technology (AIFE)^[3]. The recipient public body's SIRET number must appear on the invoice, which is then matched against the purchase order and contract document.

The September 2026 deadline changes the scale entirely: B2B e-invoicing becomes universal, and Chorus Pro evolves into the Public Invoicing Portal (PPF), the single entry point for both B2B and B2G flows^[4][5]. For a local authority, the challenge is no longer just receiving structured invoices. It is making the upstream chain reliable: clean purchase orders, accurate analytical coding, automated matching. This is precisely what our white paper on e-invoicing and procurement covers in operational detail.

Below the competitive tendering threshold, small acquisitions and mission expenses generate a volume of transactions that neither contracts nor Chorus Pro handle effectively. This is where the public-sector purchase card comes in: a governed, capped payment instrument assigned to an identified cardholder, which 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 sit within a coherent spend management framework, not add yet another silo. Agent travel expenses, mission costs, local purchases: all of this scope benefits from a single unified platform, as we detail in our white paper on expense and spend management. For the public sector, the specific challenge is compliance with public accounting rules (M14 for municipalities, M52 for départements, M71 for regions). The analytical export must align with the authorising officer's chart of accounts.

A public procurement officer who needs to demonstrate the responsible dimension of their spending requires qualified data. Structuring expenditure at the point of payment (by analytical axis, by category and by supplier) determines the quality of reporting presented to the municipal council, the assembly, or the budget controller. It is also the foundation of reliable CSR reporting, now expected even outside the strict scope of CSRD.

Greenway's 1%ForAll® programme is built on this logic: 1 % of every transaction is donated to the Greenway Foundation in a traceable, measurable way. For a local authority, this is not a marketing argument. It is an impact budget line that slots naturally into responsible public procurement reporting, with no added cost or administrative burden. It is exactly the kind of mechanism that turns routine spending into a steering indicator.

Rather than overhauling everything at once, most public-sector organisations benefit from a phased approach. Start by mapping fragmentation: how many payment providers, how many expense workflows, how many supplier invoice formats are currently coexisting? Then choose a unified platform for operational spending (purchase cards, mobility, expense reports) that feeds directly into public accounting. Finally, get ahead of PPF 2026 by tightening the upstream purchase-order process, a prerequisite for automatic matching of incoming e-invoices.

On the responsible procurement side, the effort is less about clauses (which are usually already in place) and more about measuring their effect. A system that tags each expense by impact category (sustainable mobility, local suppliers, social integration) turns the annual compliance review into a live dashboard. This is the natural extension of our invoicing & procurement dossier and our expense management dossier, applied to the specific context of the public sector.