What goes in a vendor spend dashboard?

A vendor spend dashboard combines card transactions, bills, reimbursements, purchase orders, and ledger actuals into one normalized vendor view. It should separate committed, authorized, cleared, and posted spend.

What does this dashboard look like?

The layout moves from month-to-date and year-to-date totals to where the money goes by department and category, then to vendor concentration, renewals, and consolidation — read it before approving the next renewal.

Which cards belong on this dashboard?

• Month-to-date and year-to-date vendor spend
• Spend by department and category
• Top vendors and concentration
• New vendors and spend growth
• Committed vs. actual spend
• Upcoming renewals and recurring charges
• Uncoded, unapproved, or out-of-policy spend
• Vendor consolidation opportunities

What data does this dashboard need?

• Cleared card, bill, reimbursement, and AP transaction lines
• Normalized vendor master and aliases
• Department, category, GL account, owner, and approval status
• Purchase orders, commitments, and contract renewal dates
• ERP posting or export status for close readiness

How do you build it?

1. Sync the source systems into a database and retain raw IDs, timestamps, status, and currency.
2. Build reconciled models at the business grain this dashboard requires.
3. Create one saved question per card and certify the shared models and definitions.
4. Add dashboard filters for Entity, department, vendor, category, owner, status, date range.
5. Show refresh time and the latest complete or reconciled period.

Example card SQL

WITH vendor_spend AS (
  SELECT
    normalized_vendor_id,
    normalized_vendor_name,
    SUM(reporting_currency_amount) AS spend
  FROM modeled_spend
  WHERE spend_date >= CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '12 months'
    AND spend_state IN ('CLEARED', 'POSTED')
  GROUP BY 1, 2
)
SELECT
  normalized_vendor_name,
  spend,
  ROUND(100.0 * spend / NULLIF(SUM(spend) OVER (), 0), 2) AS spend_share_pct
FROM vendor_spend
ORDER BY spend DESC
LIMIT 25;

Related

Dashboards

Integrations

Metrics

Analytics

FAQ