Spend management solutions offer many standard spend analysis reports that can help organizations identify saving opportunities and provide visibility to their spend patterns. Many solutions also allow you to create custom reports as per your business needs.
Some of the most commonly used reports available in MeRLIN are Spend by Buyer, Spend by Supplier, Spend by Category, Spend by Region, Spend by Month, Spend by Payment Term, etc. These reports give insights on what is your spending pattern, how consolidated or fragmented your spend is, how your various business units/departments are spending, how many vendors you have in a category, where can you consolidate spend and leverage volume discounts, what could be the impact of changing payments terms with your high spend suppliers, and so on. This helps you streamline your purchase price variance analysis and make your supplier negotiations much more effective and based on hard facts as well as historical trends.