Form

CTR1/CTR2: Council Tax requirement return - data upload guidance

Updated 8 February 2024

Applies to England

This guidance is applicable for:

• Billing Authorities completing the CTR1 form and parish submissions
• Precepting authorities completing the CTR2 form

If you are responsible for the CTR3 (GLA) or CTR4 (GMCA and WYCA) form, then this needs to be directly entered to the DELTA system.

We have provided equivalent CTR1 and CTR2 forms in Excel to authorities. In the CTR1 and CTR2 forms we have also set up tabs that will allow authorities to complete the form in Excel and upload these results into DELTA if they wish. We would however recommend that the upload facility is used where billing authorities have multiple parishes and local precepting authorities. Calculations and validation checks based on these figures will be performed in the template and loaded into DELTA. If there are any outstanding validation checks, these forms will be saved rather than submitted.

Manual entry directly into DELTA is still available, and manual entry after the data has been uploaded can take place (for example, to change the data uploaded). However, any upload following manual entry will overwrite these changes.

Please read and follow the guidance carefully.

For the CTR1 form, saving the workbook as a .xlsx file will be necessary to upload the data to DELTA. The same file can be used to upload the data for the CTR1 submission and for the CTR1 Parish data submission.

For the CTR2 form, the workbook will also need to be saved as a .xlsx file for a successful data upload.

It is important to note that when uploading data to DELTA, some authorities may experience issues at both the upload and validation stages of the process. When experiencing an error here, the DELTA team recommends that authorities retry the file upload. If there are issues at the validation stage i.e., the system suggesting that rows are invalid, then we recommended continuing to the import stage of the upload. Once authorities have uploaded their workbook, validated the data, and started the import, the data will be processed in the DELTA system. It is worth noting that once the Import has started, this will continue in the background even if you get logged out or navigate away from the page.

Introduction:

This guide is for bulk upload via the CTR Excel Workbook and not for XML / API uploads.

Once you have signed into DELTA, this will take you to the Welcome Page.

1. Click on ‘Submissions/Submit data’ to submit data for a data collection.

2. When the form is complete, save the workbook as a new .xlsx Excel document.

3. Log into DELTA

4. Go to Submissions > Collection Requests

5. Type in the form that you want to load into (e.g., ‘ctr1-2024-2025-apr’, ‘ctr1parishes-2024-2025-apr’ or ‘ctr2-2024-2025-apr’) into the search bar, click on the green search icon and the form should be listed.

For example:

6. Click on the ‘More’ arrow and select ‘Upload data’.

7. This will take you into the bulk upload facility.

8. Click on ‘Select file’. This will allow you to browse your folders to find the import data sheet.

9. Once you’ve chosen it, a green box at the bottom will say ‘Upload complete’. Click on ‘Next’.

10. This will then start the DELTA validation. Be aware this may take a minute or two depending on how much data is being loaded. You will need to wait until a yellow text box appears.

(Please note that the yellow text box will say ‘x out of x document is invalid’ if there are any data problems or if any further review or explanatory comments are required. These are required in cases such as where data supplied are different from pre-populated values, most commonly if there is a significant change from the previous year. Please continue with the upload. In some cases, the system can suggest that all documents are invalid on upload. We recommend that authorities continue with the import stage where this is the case.)

11. Choose ‘Next’ to proceed to import the record.

12. If presented with an option to ‘Keep’ or ‘Delete’, select the ‘Delete’ option, as there can only be one record for a collection like this (see screenshot below).

13. If presented with an option to ‘Import’ or ‘Skip’, select the ‘Import’ option, not the ‘Skip’ option.

14. Click on ‘Start import’.

15. Please note that you can re-upload your data. In doing so you will overwrite all data values previously uploaded. This includes replacing previously reported values with blanks if these cells have been left blank in the re-uploaded template and overwriting changes made directly into DELTA. Once the Import has started, this will continue in the background even if you get logged out or navigate away from the page.

16. A message in a green box will appear to say the import of the document is complete. Click on ‘Close’.

17. The data have now been saved into DELTA.

18. To ensure that authorities are satisfied with the data that has been uploaded to the DELTA system, you will be required to answer a checkbox to confirm whether you have used the bulk upload facility.

Submitting the form / dealing with validations

• Each parish will be saved/submitted on DELTA as a separate record. If you need to amend data for specific parishes or provide additional validation comments you can do so via their individual records rather than completing another bulk upload.

• To review, manually edit, and submit the data you must go into the form in DELTA. To do this click on ‘More’ and choose ‘Edit form’.

• Please address any validation warnings and errors e.g. by adding in explanations, and then completing your return by pressing on the green ‘Submit’ button at the foot of the form. Please note that some validation warnings may not show up until you attempt to submit the form.

What to do if you need to bulk upload again

If you need to carry out an additional bulk upload, DELTA has the capability to re-upload data. Follow the steps above.

Be aware: A bulk upload will replace all data and comments, and therefore you will need to fill in explanations again to satisfy error flags. Therefore, you may prefer to make changes directly in DELTA.

Queries

If you have any queries regarding bulk upload, please email us at ctr.statistics@levellingup.gov.uk.