IT Financial Review

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This report provides an executive view of the overall OpEx budget variance and OpEx spend of your organization. The report breaks down IT cost per cost pool and owner so you can determine which IT owners are responsible for the largest IT spend. Various charts in the report also help you determine whether variances are real or caused by miscategorization.

Use Cases

This report solves the following use cases:
  • Compare project OpEx and CapEx actuals to project plan, identify factors driving the variance and explain variance.
  • Analyze spend variance at the cost center and account level; deliver executive level views, and provide commentary to explain outliers.
  • Analyze and compare the OpEx addressable/non-addressable costs broken out by Account and Cost Center.
  • Analyze IT's overall costs by standard cost pool and compare the distribution against peers.
  • Review general ledger line items in areas of variance or greatest spend.
  • Review total spend by cost center and account to identify the largest areas of spend and review trends over time.

Personas

This report is designed for use by the following roles:
  • CIO -1 (TBM Office)
  • Cost center owners
  • IT Financial analysts

Questions answered

  • Where are significant variances between spend vs. plan?
  • Which cost centers are driving spend vs. plan variance and who is responsible for those cost centers?
  • Is a variance real or caused by mis-categorization of an expense?
  • Where does the largest portion of our IT spend go? By cost pool? By IT owner (for example, CIO -1)? By cost center owner?
  • Are there significant changes in spend period-over-period?
  • What expense line items contribute to the cost of an IT function?

Visualizations

The IT Financial Review report includes the following visualizations:

Key element Description
(1) Report collection

This report collection provides the IT financial details you need to review your spend variances and forecast accuracy:

Financial Review (default view)

Financial Analysis

Budget Variance Analysis

Financial Benchmarks
(2) Slicers

Use the local/global slicers to refine data in your report. Slicers in this report let you see your cost data by account group, 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 or CIO: Without setting any slicers, you can see the overview of the spend across all cost centers in the organization. You can drill down into cost pools, cost center owners, and individual accounts.

• Cost Center Owner or CIO -1: Set the Cost Center or Cost Center Owner slicers to filter for your areas of responsibility.

• 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) KPIs

KPIs provide a high-level view of your OpEx spend:

• OpEx: These two KPIs show your overall OpEx budget compared to the OpEx spend for the current month. The percentage of variance is shown to the right.

• OpEx YTD: These two KPIs show your OpEx spend compared to the budget YTD. The percentage of variance is shown to the right.

• Annual OpEx: These two KPIs show your annual OpEx spend compared to the budget YTD. The percentage of variance is shown to the right.

• Addressable: These KPIs help you determine the agility of your IT spend by looking at the ratio of fixed and variable expenditures for the fiscal year.
(4) OpEx Budget Variance

Select a metric (cost pool, account group, owner, cost center owner, or cost center ID) from the View by list to populate the Top Over Budget YTD and Top Under Budget YTD charts. This information will help you prioritize where to look for reduction opportunities.

Select a bar in either chart to open a Variance Detail dialog that shows the summary of the OpEx budget, variance, and percentage of variance for all items in the selected metric based on the time periods you select above the table.
(5) OpEx Forecast Variance

Select a metric (cost pool, account group, owner, cost center owner, or cost center ID) from the View by list to populate the Top Over Forecast YTD and Top Under Forecast YTD charts. Trend charts with the items with the highest variance in spending to plan YTD and the spending trend over the previous six months.

Select a bar in either chart to open a Variance Detail dialog that shows the summary of the OpEx Forecast for the selected metric based on the time periods you select above the table.
(6) Spend Analysis

Select a metric (cost pool, account group, owner, cost center owner, or cost center ID) from the View by list to populate the OpEx Spend YTD and OpEx Trend charts with the items with the highest variance in spending to plan YTD and the spending trend over the previous six months.

Select a bar in either chart to open a Variance Detail dialog that shows the monthly, quarterly, and yearly spend for the selected metric based on the time periods you select above the table.
(7) FY Outlook

Select this tab to view the OpEx variance between budget and forecast.

Select any item in the left column to see the transaction details from your financial source of record (such as your GL).
(8) Email icon The email icon is visible only to financial analysts with admin permissions. Select the icon to open the Financial Variance Review email report. See the Finance Variance Review email report.