The spending you can see coming.

Most purchases are private. A company decides it needs a new machine, asks three suppliers, and buys one. Nobody outside the building knows until it is done.

Some purchases are different, because the thing being bought changes what the company is allowed to do. A haulier cannot run more lorries than its licence permits. A recycler cannot take a new material until its permit lists it. A battery project cannot energise without a connection date. In each case the company has to ask first, the request is published, and it carries numbers and dates.

That is a capex signal: a public, dated record of a decision to grow that must come before the money is spent.

Not every record is a signal. A renewal says nothing new. A transfer between two companies changes the name on the paper and nothing on the ground. An application with no figure in it gives you nothing to size.

A useful signal has four things. A change, not a state: something went up, was added or was committed. A figure: vehicles, tonnes a year, megawatts. A date: when the decision falls, or when the new capacity must exist. And a company you can identify, because a name on a form is not always the business behind it.

Anything missing one of the four is kept out. Most records are, which is why a raw feed of them is almost useless and a filtered one is not.

Operator licence applications, for anyone who sells to fleets. They state how many vehicles and trailers an operator wants to run and where, weeks before the decision.

Environmental permits and their variations, for anyone who sells to industrial sites. They state what a site may process, in what quantity, and what it must monitor.

Grid connection offers, capacity agreements and planning approvals for generating stations, for anyone who sells into energy. Together they separate projects that will be built, on a date, from the much larger number that will not.

None of these is enough on its own. Joined to what is publicly filed about the company that holds them, its accounts, its charges and its group, they become something a salesperson can use.

It depends on the trade. A fleet application comes weeks before vehicles are ordered. A permit variation comes months before process plant is installed. An energy milestone can come a year before main plant is delivered.

In every case it comes before the buyer has chosen a supplier, and usually before the buyer has spoken to one. That is the whole value of it: the difference between being asked to quote and finding out afterwards who was.