Additional Information About Commodity Codes

How to use Commodity Codes:

Commodity codes are standard classification codes for products and services used to categorize where money is spent within an organization. Using these codes, we can report what kinds of items are purchased to build better contracts to serve the University’s needs. These contracts should reflect overall best value.

Kent State University uses a modified UNSPSC Commodity Code list of 192 groupings. The modified list was created in hopes to generalize most spend, reduce subjectivity and create simplicity for the administrative tasks. Not every commodity is listed, but each should fit into a generalized category.

Please use the 60/40 rule of thumb when representing your purchase. For example, if most of your purchase was “general office supplies” and you added a box of paper, then you would code the transaction to “4412000 – Office Supplies”. However, if your purchase was to order copier paper and you added a box of pens, please code to “14111800 - Multi-purpose/Copy Paper”.

It’s important to report the commodity correctly to better capture data for savings identification purposes.  If you have a question about coding, please contact procurement@kent.edu for help. Also, if an often-used code (over $25,000 annual spend) was missed and there is no other general identifier, new codes can be added if necessary.