Spend Insight

Users of all sorts, whether they enter transactions, review transactions, or approve transactions, can use Spend Insight to see how the transaction impacts the budget before the transaction is posted. This helps users make informed decisions during the spend process.

Subscription

Spend Management and at least one of the following:

Accounts Payable

General Ledger

Purchasing

Regional availability

All regions

User type Business user with admin privileges (for configuration)
Permissions

List, View, Add, Edit for the appropriate area

Spend Insight - Run
Prerequisites
  • Spend Management must be configured.
  • If applicable, user-defined books must be enabled and specified in Spend Management.

Use Spend Insight on a transaction

  1. Create or open a transaction supported by Spend Management—either a General Ledger journal entry, AP supplier invoice, or a configured Purchasing transaction.

    If you do not know what transactions are supported, ask your budget administrator or system administrator to check for you.

  2. At any time after you add a line item but before you post the transaction, select Show spend insight.
  3. The spending insight dialog box appears, showing you the impact that the transaction will have on the available budget.

    If you have multiple budgets, the budget that's used is based on the transaction's posting date.

    For example, suppose you have a budget for each calendar year. If a transaction has a posting date of 12/28/2022 and a document date of 1/15/2023, Spend Insight shows how the transaction relates to the budget for 2022.

  4. To drill down into the budget, actual, or committed expenses, select the appropriate blue link.
  5. If you add more line items, select Show spend insight again to refresh the information.

    Spend insight checks against each line item, so it's important to refresh if you add more line items after viewing Spend Insight.

If all line items in a purchase requisition are unique, each line item is shown individually on its own line. If there are more than 10 non-unique line items in a single requisition, as many as 3 line items are combined into a single line on the Spend Insight list.

If you track committed expenses in a user-defined book and use Purchasing

Spend Insight calculates based on the primary General Ledger posting that's set up for the transaction definition. If you've enabled additional posting, that secondary posting is not reflected in Spend Insight.

For example:

  • You've set up Spend Management to include committed expenses and created a user-defined book to track them.

  • You have a purchase order transaction definition set up to post to the committed expenses book.

  • You want the amount posed in the committed expenses book to be deducted from your committed expenses when you view Spend Insight information in the purchasing AR sales invoice.

The best practice solution:

  • Create a transaction definition that falls immediately before the AR sales invoice in the purchasing workflow.

  • Set up this transaction to release the invoice amount from the committed expenses book.

This step also ensures proper clearing of the committed expenses book and avoids the need to adjust for variances between the purchase order total and the AR sales invoice total.