Background

"Where are we spending money on SaaS?" "Where can we cut costs?" "How much can we cut?" "We need to cut X% by next year, how can we do that?" Are you constantly fielding these types of questions from your finance team?

Lumos has your back - introducing Lumos Analytics for Spend Reporting. 

By leveraging Lumos for managing your SaaS, you can quickly get the answers you need to report to leadership and identify the biggest opportunities to save, plan and take action.

Understanding Expected Spend 

At a glance, gain quick insights into your managed vendor agreements so that you can plan your year and answer questions from leadership.

Overall Spend Metrics

To give you a comprehensive understanding of your key spending metrics and assess projected expenditures, as well as to determine the potential range of cost-cutting opportunities, Lumos provides the following metrics:

1. Number of Active Vendor Agreements — The number of vendors considered “active” as of the current date. A vendor is considered active if its renewal stage is marked as “In Review” or “Active”.

2. Projected Annualized Spend — The current monthly spend multiplied by 12 for each active vendor agreement.

3. Committed FY Spend — This is how much you have committed to spend this year. The sum of month-by-month spend over this current fiscal year, for all contracts considered “active” within this year.

4. Expected FY Spend — This is how much based on your renewal plan you are expecting to spend. The sum of month-by-month spend over this current fiscal year, for all contracts considered “active” within this year. We assume an agreement will renew unless it is explicitly marked as terminated.

Spend by Vendor Agreements 

• Spend Forecast: See the exact timing of your spend vs savings over the course of the year. See the timing of the spend breakdown by committed vs renewal. 

• Expected Fiscal Year Spend By Team: Understand how the vendor agreements associated with different teams impact the expected spend values.

• Annualized Spend by Contract Size: Understand your portfolio of agreements to easily determine if your investments are concentrated in large contracts or dispersed among numerous small contracts.

Preparing for Renewals 

Proactively plan your month and ensure you have the time to properly right-size your most important contracts.

• View all of your upcoming renewals by month in the Renewals Breakdown chart.

  • Choose whether to group these renewals by: Annual Cost of Agreements, Number of Agreements, or Potential Savings  

    

  • Choose whether you are viewing the renewals by renewal date or opt-out date.

    

• Determine where you have the biggest opportunities to right size contracts with Lumos data — View Annual Potential Savings by Renewal Date

• Determine how many renewals are happening next month so you can plan your calendar —  View # of Agreements by Renewal Date

• Determine what total amount is approaching opt-out, so you can find opportunities to terminate vendors — View Annual cost of Agreements by Opt-Out date

Understanding Employee Spend 

Easily generate the reports that help you understand each team's license use. Get the insights you need to finally implement a chargeback budgeting model.

Monthly Spend Breakdown

• Dig into how each team's license use impacts monthly spend. 

  

• See the breakdown of employee spend from licenses across applications grouped by: title, team, manager, department, division, office location and any custom fields pulled from your Source of Truth.
  

• View the breakdown as the Average Spend or Total Spend

Reporting on Savings

Quantify Savings realized through Lumos from inactivity workflows, access reviews and/or single app page removals

Unrealized vs Realized Savings

Easily report on the savings you have achieved through Lumos. There are two exciting new concepts: unrealized savings and realized savings. Unrealized savings - Removing a license counts as an upcoming saving because while the value has not been realized, it is on the horizon. Realized savings - Once that contract renews, the saving is converted and you’ve successfully got yourself some realized savings! 

Additional Tips and Tricks for Saving in Lumos 

• Remember that removing a license doesn't necessarily mean you will save money immediately, but it does mean you are avoiding future costs.

• Be sure to add all relevant line items from your contract to Lumos so that you can accurately track savings. You also need to link entitlements to those line items so we can quantify savings when a license is removed. 😃 Check this article out on how to get started!

• If you have any questions or concerns about savings reporting in Lumos, don't hesitate to reach out to support@lumos.com. We are here to help you save the day! (and your wallet)

FAQ 

How does Lumos account for different license costs?

Different licenses for the same application have different costs.

If you remove a Zoom Pro license from a user you save $20 / month. However, if you remove a Zoom Webinar license from a user you could save a whopping $400 / month. 😱 On the other hand, if you remove someone’s Zoom Basic license you don’t save any money since it’s free. It’s beneficial to track each of these separately to accurately quantify your savings.

Lumos elegantly tracks savings at the per-license level for you!

On the vendors tab, you can add line items from your contract and link each individual item to license data that Lumos regularly pulls in. In addition to the number of active users, Lumos will detect Zoom Basic, Zoom Pro, and Zoom Webinar licenses. You can directly link each of these licenses to a line item and when a license is removed, the savings will update! We’re all about that granular control over your spend. 😄 

Where does Lumos pull the fields for spend by employee?

Lumos uses the fields mapped in your Source of Truth Setting. This includes any Custom Fields that may have been brought into Lumos.

How does Lumos calculate Annual Potential Savings?

We determine a vendor agreement’s potential savings by summing the annualized potential savings for all of its line items.

For each line item in a vendor agreement, if we can retrieve license data for the line item, we can calculate its annualized potential savings. We can retrieve license data if we can count the number of active, inactive, terminated, and unassigned accounts for a license. These are based on how frequently an account uses an app, as well as whether the user attached to an account has an active employment status.

We find the annual potential savings for a line item by multiplying how much a line item costs for one unit over the course of one year by the number of inactive, terminated, and unassigned seats. In other words: line item’s annual unit cost * (# inactive seats + # terminated seats + # unassigned seats)