UGA Vendor Payments

Friday afternoons are for doing stuff I shouldn't be doing and not doing the stuff I should be doing. In other words, I'm playing around with data -- this time UGA data on payments it made to various vendors. And by various, I mean 27,196 vendors listed in the 2016 fiscal year (data for the 2017 fiscal year, which ended in June, isn't available yet). There's not much here, just the name of the vendor, the total payment for the fiscal year, and the number of payments made. With no explanation whatsoever, here are the Top Ten and their amounts. I'll comment briefly below the list. Numbers are rounded to preserve my sanity.

1. UGA Payroll ($931.9 million)
2. Bank of America ($27.0 million)
3. Georgia Power Company ($19.2 million)
4. Office of the State Treasurer ($13.0 million)
5. UGA Research Foundation ($12.3 million)
6. UGAREF O'Malley's Building LLC ($11.9 million)
7. AJAX Building Corporation of Georgia ($8.1 million)
8. EBSCO Media ($8.0 million)
9. Fisher Scientific Co. LLC ($7.5 million)
10. UGAREF East Campus Housing LLC ($7.0 million)

A few notes about above. Payroll is #1, that's no surprise, and a lot of the others appear to be construction costs or payments to to the research foundation or for the electricity that keeps me cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Fun things I found. Jittery Joe's received a $68,799.86 payment. I'm a fan. You can't pay them enough. Chick-fil-A got $112,157.36. Oh, and for you chip lovers out there, $155,956.76 was paid to Frito Lay. With so many payments, a lot of them are weird looking but normal stuff for a university this size. Here's one -- Versus Spa. That one got my journalism spidey senses tingling but it turns out that $114,864.90 went to a routine company that has nothing to do with spas. Oh, and Homeland Security received $110,235 from us. No idea why. 

Yes, I checked for myself. I'm not in there, though there are a lot of individuals listed, mostly small amounts.