Utilising Our Cost Analytics Feature

The cost analytics feature gives you a central view of your organisation’s SaaS spending, helping you understand where your money is going, how spending is changing and where there may be opportunities to optimise costs. Rather than relying on individual invoices or manually maintained spreadsheets, Cost Analytics brings your SaaS spending information together and presents it through dashboards, trends and application-level data.

At the top of the cost nnalytics dashboard, you’ll find several key indicators that provide a quick overview of your current SaaS position.

These include:

• Monthly SaaS Spend: Your current monthly software expenditure and annualised run rate.
• Monthly Waste: Identified potential waste and the corresponding annual opportunity.
• Next-Month Forecast: An indication of expected spending based on upcoming commitments.
• Estate Health: An overall indication of the current health of your SaaS estate.

These figures provide a quick starting point before you explore the more detailed analytics below. The reporting period can also be changed using the timeframe selector, allowing you to analyse your data over different periods.

Spend Trends

The ‘Spend Trend’ section helps you understand how your SaaS spending is changing over time. You can view spending trends across your applications and use different views to examine areas such as the applications growing fastest, changes during the current month and performance against budget.

As more historical data becomes available, these trends can provide greater insight into how your SaaS expenditure is developing rather than simply showing what you are spending today.

Understanding Where Your Money Goes

The ‘Application Cost Concentration’ section shows which applications contribute most to your monthly SaaS spend. This makes it easy to identify the applications that represent the largest proportion of your software budget.

For example, if one or two applications account for a significant amount of your monthly expenditure, these may warrant closer attention when reviewing licences, usage, costs or upcoming renewals. Looking at cost concentration can therefore help you prioritise your analysis rather than treating every subscription as equally significant.

Decision Signals

Cost analytics also provides ‘Decision Signals’, which are designed to highlight useful information about the movement and direction of your SaaS spending. These can include: month-on-month changes, top-moving applications, overall spending direction and average monthly spend.

These indicators help provide context around the headline spending figures and can highlight areas that may deserve further investigation.

Reviewing Monthly Service Movement

The ‘Monthly Service Movement’ section provides a more detailed view of application-level spending across the selected period. You can see individual services alongside their monthly costs, allowing you to compare how spending has changed over time.

This can be useful when investigating changes to your SaaS estate, such as an application becoming more expensive, a new subscription being introduced or spending changing following a change in licence allocation. The table can be viewed across multiple applications, giving you a more detailed picture of how individual services contribute to your overall SaaS spend.

Allocation

The ‘Allocation’ section provides another way to understand where SaaS spending sits within your organisation. Rather than looking only at total company expenditure, allocation data can help you understand how software costs relate to different parts of your SaaS environment.

This can be useful for Finance teams reviewing budgets and for department leaders wanting greater visibility into the software costs associated with their teams.

Optimisation

The ‘Optimisation’ section focuses on areas where your SaaS spending may warrant further review. Cost analytics can help highlight potential opportunities by bringing spending information together with the wider SaaS information available within SaaSi Hub. This means cost decisions can be considered alongside applications, licences, employees and other relevant information rather than looking at an invoice in isolation.

Using Cost Analytics to Make Better Decisions

Cost analytics isn’t designed to automatically decide which subscriptions you should cancel. Instead, it gives you the information needed to identify where further investigation may be worthwhile. For example, a high-cost application might be completely justified if it is essential to the business. Another application with a much smaller monthly cost could represent a bigger optimisation opportunity if its licences are largely unused.

The value comes from being able to see the spending, understand the context and then decide what action is appropriate.

In short, Cost Analytics helps you move beyond simply knowing how much you spend on SaaS to understanding where that money is going, how spending is changing and where your attention may be needed next.