Course 22 · Spend and optimization

Every savings story needs a denominator. This course starts there, then moves to the tools that shrink the bill.

Lesson one, the spend picture. By the end you can say what you spend from the ledger, not estimates. The masthead answers it first.

Spend by category. Each bar splits into its vendors, so concentration reads at a glance. When one agreement dwarfs several others combined, that shape is the finding.

The budget forecast, twelve months forward. The contracted run rate is the dashed baseline, the expected line carries its value printed at the end, and the band behind it holds the range. Underneath, the renewals priced into the curve, so finance sees which decisions move the number.

Spend by vendor puts every vendor on one scale, largest first. Every row opens that vendor's contracts. This is the view for the number before the meeting: what we pay this vendor, answered in one glance and defensible from the ledger.

Exports gather the whole estate in one card, the Excel and PDF reports and the raw CSVs, so the figures land in the formats finance already uses.

Lesson two, the invoice against the contract. By the end you can turn a bill that feels wrong into a figure.

Here the sample workspace shows the point: three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars billed above contract, on a single invoice. Every line gets a verdict, ok, price above contract, billed over entitlement, off contract item, uplift cap breach, or above your saved MSA rate card.

Checking an invoice takes one upload. Better, set the forward in address once, an owner action under integrations, and every invoice forwarded there checks itself.

Once findings exist, the case file opens: the parsed invoice with every flag marked, the recovery sheet, and a vendor dispute letter drafted from your own numbers.

Lesson three, Microsoft 365. By the end you can price the seats nobody uses and the tiers nobody right-sized.

The premise is plain. Inactive seats accrue quietly between renewals, and the tool prices the surplus and turns it into a per user reassignment plan.

Before you commit to Microsoft's renewal numbers, run yours. The analysis happens in your browser, so user data never leaves the page, and a sample estate is one click away if you want to see the result first.

One export is required, the active users export. It carries the activity the inactivity verdicts build on, and the threshold slides from fourteen to one hundred eighty days until it matches your reality.

The second export, apps usage, is optional, and it sharpens the tier calls: which E3 seats use only mail and files, and would do the same work on E1.

Lesson four, cloud commitments. By the end you can size a commit from an optimized baseline, not the unoptimized one.

That order matters. A committed spend deal locks in today's waste, so read the bill for waste first, then commit to what remains.

Pick your provider, AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI, and drop a daily cost export. The scan sweeps the estate while a live ticker calls out real findings from your file, run rate, always on bands, weekend deltas, and spike days.

Note the trust line. The export parses in your browser and never uploads, so the first pass costs nothing but the drop. When you later share the brief, it carries aggregates and the written assessment only, never the file itself.

What you get: an executive brief, the full FinOps report, the money bridge from today's run rate to the optimized number, and a phased action plan you can track.

Lesson five, Spend Intelligence. By the end you can read a raw AP export end to end. This is the tool for the ledger nobody has ever read as a whole.

Drop the CSV and the ledger explains itself. Every supplier classified, duplicate payments and quiet unit price steps flagged with the evidence rows, and the next six months forecast with buying windows marked.

Triage the findings, worth chasing or dismiss, and the flagged total follows your verdicts. That closes Wave two of the Academy. The rest of the platform is covered screen by screen in the user manual and the demo library.

Now you. Open your largest spend category this week. Ten minutes.

Last check. Overbilling shows where? What sizes a commit? Certified User, complete.