Analytics
Vendor Overview
The Vendor Overview tab provides a consolidated view of vendor-level spend and trends. It serves as a central hub for assessing supplier performance and driving strategic sourcing decisions.
🎯 Purpose
This dashboard provides comprehensive vendor intelligence by answering:
- Identification: Who are our top vendors by total spend?
- Velocity: How are spending trends with specific suppliers changing over time?
- Risk: What is our vendor concentration risk, and are we over-reliant on a small group?
🛠️ What You Can Do
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Identify top vendors | Instantly see which vendors represent the highest financial commitment. |
| Compare trends | Analyze year-over-year or month-over-month spend patterns for key suppliers. |
| Assess performance | Evaluate vendor consistency and billing reliability over the contract lifecycle. |
| Analyze concentration | Quantify the risk associated with over-reliance on specific strategic vendors. |
| Support sourcing | Gather high-fidelity data to prepare for strategic supplier negotiations. |
🗂️ Vendor Taxonomy Details
This section explains how vendors are classified and grouped within the SpendCraft platform. It is designed to validate normalization results and surface consolidation opportunities.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Review groupings | Understand how child entities are rolled up into parent vendor hierarchies. |
| Validate classifications | Confirm that vendor category assignments accurately reflect the services provided. |
| Identify consolidation | Find redundant vendors in the same category to reduce total supplier count. |
| Check mappings | Verify that vendor normalization has correctly merged duplicate supplier names. |
📊 Key Metrics
The Vendor dashboards typically highlight the following strategic indicators:
- Vendor Spend Ranking: A prioritized list of suppliers ordered by aggregate spend.
- Spend Trends: A time-series view of vendor-specific spending to identify growth or decline.
- Vendor Count: The total number of unique, normalized active vendors in the dataset.
- Concentration Analysis: The percentage of total spend held by the top 10, 25, or 50 vendors.
- Taxonomy Coverage: A health metric showing the percentage of vendors successfully classified.
🔄 Recommended Workflow
To effectively manage your supply base, follow this progression:
- Hierarchy Review: Start by reviewing the top vendors to confirm the "Big Spenders."
- Trend Analysis: Analyze spend trends for key suppliers to catch sudden volume increases.
- Concentration Check: Review your risk profile (e.g., if $80%$ of spend is with 10 vendors, assess your contingency plans).
- Taxonomy Validation: Ensure that high-spend vendors are mapped to the correct categories for accurate reporting.
- Consolidation Scan: Isolate categories with high vendor counts and identify candidates for consolidation.
💡 Tips for Success
- Risk Mitigation: High concentration in few vendors may indicate supply chain vulnerability; use this data to identify where secondary sourcing is needed.
- Consistency: Use taxonomy details to ensure that similar vendors across different business units are classified identically.
- Negotiation Prep: Export vendor-specific data summaries before attending supplier review meetings or QBRs.
- Holistic View: Combine these insights with Payment Terms to assess the full financial impact of your supplier relationships.
Next Step: Need to see the raw transactions behind these vendor totals? Move to the Spend Details Guide.