The bottom of the Dashboard, under Analytics & insights, turns your list into trends and suggestions.
Spending trends and predictions. A chart of monthly spending for the last 12 months, plus a forecast for the next 6. At the moment the past months are drawn from your current list (each month shows what all your items cost per month today), so the line is flat unless your costs differ, and the Confidence figure, which says how well a straight line fits, is usually 100%. Treat this chart as a picture of your present monthly cost, not as a history of what you paid. The forecast does not know about price rises, cancellations or items you have not entered yet.
Forecast vs actual spend. A band around a trend line, comparing the bought-in-period totals from the expenditure trend with a smoothed forecast, with a confidence figure. Use it to notice a sudden jump in what you added recently.
Provider cost comparison. A bar chart and list of your providers by total cost, with the number of services and the average cost per service for each. Use it to see who you pay the most and where several small bills add up.
Savings opportunities. The widget lists ideas with an estimated saving and a total ("Potential savings"). It looks for three things:
- Duplicate services detected. More than one item of the same type with the same provider, for example three hosting plans with one company. It suggests consolidating or cancelling, and estimates a saving.
- Missing renewal dates. Items with no renewal date, which cannot warn you.
- Provider is expensive. A provider whose average cost per item is more than 50% above the average across your own providers. The comparison is with your other providers, not with the market, so a provider can be flagged just because it is your most expensive one.
These are prompts to check, not advice. A "duplicate" may be deliberate (separate client sites on one host), and the saving figure is a rough estimate. Open the item, decide, and cancel through the provider if you agree (the item's details window has a Cancel Subscription button that opens the provider's cancellation page).
Make the numbers trustworthy
- Fill in cost, currency and billing cycle on every item.
- Add purchase dates: the expenditure trend places each item in the month it was bought.
- Keep the provider names consistent by choosing them from the directory.