What is spend analysis and why does it matter?
Oct 2022
Spend analysis is imperative for your professional procurement function as it reviews all spend data. This data-gathering process helps you gain insight into business spending, so you can take the necessary action to reduce costs, increase efficiency, improve supplier relationships, and calculate risks.
The standard methodology used for spend analysis involves data retrieval, cleansing, classifying, analysing, and presentation.
Read more to discover why spend analysis is crucial for your business.
Benefits of Spend Analysis
Spend analysis is of enormous importance; if you don’t know where your money flows, you may be wasting it with no return on profit. Spend analysis offers the following advantages:
Risk Management
Spend analysis is a crucial component of risk management as it helps you salvage your finances if things don’t go according to plan. You establish reasonable goals by calculating how much you can invest in a risky trade without compromising your financial stability.
Increased Transparency
Running a business isn’t just about reaching out to clients and delivering projects – you must also have full insight into all cost data. With spend analysis, the organisation has greater transparency into how much is spent on various goods and services – making it easier to establish the profit margin.
Visibility of Suppliers, Materials, and Services
Spend analysis allows the company to oversee its vendors and how much money goes towards materials and services during manufacturing. By providing this information, spend analysis allows companies to determine the products’ necessity, cost, and whether the suppliers meet their needs. This enables companies to make more strategic financial decisions.
Increased Productivity
It takes a lot of time to perform a spend analysis. Collecting, filtering, and analysing data is a process that needs constant tracking. The good news is that this analysis can be automated, increasing the company’s productivity by giving employees more time to focus on meaningful and strategic action.
Prioritising Resources
Spend analysis can give you essential insights into the core requirements of your business. Determining and prioritising your company’s needs is vital as you can allocate your resources accordingly.
Savings
A clear vision of your finances can determine whether some of your money is spent on inadequate supplies or services. If so, spend analysis can help redirect that money towards the company’s savings account.
Helps Implement Data-Based Measures
Analysis of your company’s costs can help you discover new opportunities to improve Operational processes. Having all data available at your disposal allows you to easily make decisions based on facts and take the correct measures.
Xelix: Your Trusted Tool for Spend Analysis
Spend analysis can help you save resources and allocate them intelligently. However, this isn’t always a one-man’s job. Xelix – an AI-based software, can help you automate and speed up the spend analysis process.
Xelix products provide meaningful analytics by collecting data across disparate systems and business units. This helps you build predictive reports in different areas of your financial management, such as cost data and team productivity.
Book a demo today and learn how Xelix can help ensure an effective and hassle-free spend analysis.