Financial Analysis

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This report shows a detailed view of month-over-month OpEx and CapEx variance, year-to-date budget variance, and year-to-date forecast variance. You can use this report to review and manage IT spend and variance for account groups, account subgroups, accounts, and cost centers.

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Key element Description
(1) Report collection

Each of the reports in this collection provide the financial details you need to review your spend variances and forecast accuracy:
(2) Slicers

Use the local and global slicers to refine the data in your report. Slicers in this report let you see your cost data by region, account group, and organizational accountability, including cost center and ID, cost center owner, and owner.

The following roles can use the slicers in this report for a more personalized view:

  • IT Financial Controller: Without setting any slicers, you can see the overview of the spend of each cost pool across the organization. You can drill down into cost pools, cost center owners, and individual accounts.
  • Financial Analyst: Set the Cost Center slicer for areas you support or set a specific account group to enable a detailed, cross-organizational category spend analysis.
(3) Report views

Select one of the following views:

• OpEx: Analyze your month-over-month OpEx change, YTD budget and forecast variance and remaining budget/forecast. Additional columns can be added to the table to change the analysis to focus on account group, account subgroup, account description, account name, and/or cost center (element 4).

• Select any item in the left-most columns to see transaction-level details for that account hierarchy or cost center.

• Select View in the Trend column to see the OpEx trending for the selected item. The bar chart allows you to view the trend of spend variance against budget and forecast YTD. The table provides details about cost, budget, forecasts, and variance percentages.

• CapEx: Analyze your month-over-month CapEx change, YTD budget and forecast variance, and remaining budget/forecast. Additional columns can be added to the table to change the analysis to focus on account group, account subgroup, account description, account name, and cost center.

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• Select any item in the left-most columns to see transaction-level details for that account hierarchy or cost center.

• Select View in the Trend column to see the CapEx trending for the selected item. The bar chart allows you to view the variance against budget and forecast YTD. The table provides details about the CapEx budget variance percentage, CapEx, and CapEx budget.

• Variance Summary: This tab provides a visual analysis of your OpEx actuals compared to budget and to forecast. Hover over any segment of see details. Click a segment once to drill into the cost pool. (A box can contain multiple clickable segments.)

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• Select a segment a second time to see account-level transaction details.

• Return to the original view by clicking the Total Cost breadcrumb just above either image.

Questions answered:

• Where do we have the largest spend?

• Where do we have the largest change period over period?

• Are we spending more than we expected?

• What is the spend that drove the difference between the latest forecast and the budget?

• Is a variance real, or is it caused by mis-categorization?

• How does a cost center adjust their forecast to hit a target?