Spendata is more capable than many systems costing 10 times, or even 100 times as much. So, why have we priced it so low? It’s simple. We’ve priced it for volume sales because we think it’s time to make spend analysis affordable for every business user.

Spendata is not only inexpensive, but also powerful and secure. It’s perfect for:

• end users who are non-experts;
• consulting firms that want to empower their clients;
• small businesses that can’t afford enterprise solutions but want the spend visibility and cost savings larger organizations enjoy;
• larger enterprises that want to equip their analysts and commodity managers with the ability to make intelligent sourcing decisions quickly and accurately.

For many spend analysis vendors, the software is just a means to an end; namely, to sell data and consulting services that are bundled together with the system.

What drives up the costs of conventional systems?

Data refreshes

For many spend analysis vendors, the software is just a means to an end; namely, to sell data and consulting services that are bundled together with the system. Data services begin with building the initial data set and continue on, month after month, as “data refreshes.” Each refresh is billable. Every change is billable, and the meter is always running.

In contrast, Spendata is all about the software. Our software equips you with powerful easy-to-use tools to accomplish changes and refreshes on your own. If you do contract with a third party for expertise and assistance, you're never at their mercy. You can dismiss them whenever you like, and continue to maintain and enhance your system easily.

Data mapping services

In contrast, Spendata not only provides you with powerful auto-familying and auto-mapping tools, but it also contains easy-to-use drg-and-drop mapping tools for manual corrections and enhancements. Short, targeted videos demonstrate each step of the process.

When your vendor has to make every mapping change, costs add up very quickly. You must pay for the time needed for the vendor to understand and execute your instructions, then the time you must spend checking their work and reporting their mistakes, and then the time the vendor must spend fixing them.

Fixed costs

You will also find that with many competitive offerings, not much effort is invested in the product itself. Some spend analysis “systems” are just a third-party BI tool with some custom dashboards. This means you end up paying for the software and operating system licenses necessary to run that BI tool.

In contrast, Spendata harnesses the processing power you’ve already paid for by running right on your laptop or desktop, in the browser. And, since your data is never sent to some foreign server, and is always kept right on your machine, that means you don’t have to trust someone else’s security team.

Services Can be Useful, But Independence Should Be the Endgame

With Spendata, you pay only for the product which is fully documented and easy to use on your own. If a product cannot be separated from the services, then pricing must include the services, and you can never be independent of them (well, actually you can).

That is not to say that consulting services are not useful; on the contrary, sourcing consultants and expert analysts can be extremely useful in generating savings. However, the end goal should be to jump-start savings, rather than make you dependent on a third party for all time. If the consultant delivers a spend analysis system that you can leverage on your own for value in the future, that’s hugely better than a spreadsheet, a Powerpoint, or a system that weds you to that consultant’s services in perpetuity.

If you can’t map your own data, reorganize, merge, refine and freely dump and reload it, your data is effectively held hostage by your vendor. You see only what their mapping and their fixed-function dashboards allow you to see. After you visit a dashboard on Monday, what new things can you learn by visiting the same dashboard on Tuesday – or next week – or next month?

When we introduced BIQ in 2004, we cut the spend analysis pricing of the day by a factor of 100. Our competitors panicked, claiming that BIQ was a “go-kart,” that it was a “toy,” and so on. Analysts disagreed, and so did our customers, because BIQ was far more powerful than its competitors.

Now, Spendata takes a factor of 10 to 100 out of today’s pricing. You might even say we’ve separated the secret from the sauce.