Expense Control

What is Analytics for Expense Control?

• Use the ability to drill into your data to understand what you’re spending money on, where expenses are growing, and what is driving the expenses
• We take expense control beyond looking at standard reports. We create flexible analytics solution to slice and dice your data

Why Use Analytics for Expense Control

• Standard reports provide a snapshot, but they don’t tell a detailed story
• Most reports enable viewing expenses summarized the GL Account level. However, there can be many different types of transactions charged to a single account.
• It is important to understand charges by vendor, by property (or unit), by employee etc. in order to have a solid understanding of where the money is going

Challenges

• Quality of the data is often the biggest challenge
• Sometimes the transactions are not charged to the correct GL Account
• Transactions have incomplete information (for example, a $50 payment to a locksmith doesn’t show the name of the locksmith or the property/unit the service performed for)

Solutions

• We extract data from the General Ledger and set it up for analysis
• Sometimes, effort has to be made at cleaning the data so that transactions are reflected in the right accounts
• By analyzing activity in individual GL Accounts over months, quarters and years, we display trends, spikes and dips
• We also compute ratios that reflect increasing or decreasing expense per, say lease or unit
• Using Excel or Tableau, we are able to drill down to individual transaction
• The analysis highlights GL Accounts where expenses are growing faster than income generating activity