A typical spend cube is like a published book: divided into chapters, perhaps illustrated with charts and graphs. If there’s a typo in the book, you need to wait for the next edition before it’s fixed — ditto for the spend cube.

Alas, if only it were just a few typos.

In reality, a spend cube contains hundreds of baked-in assumptions (and mistakes), and it's quite possibly missing entire “chapters” of information. Waiting for the next edition isn’t realistic; your analysis has to happen right now, in real time.

Generally speaking, you have only one option: download transactions to a spreadsheet, perform the necessary alterations and augmentations, and analyze them there. This is slow, error-prone, expensive, and frustrating, but there is no choice.

Create a Preferred Vendor dimension (1:35)

This is why analysts love Spendata. They can edit hierarchies, map dimensions, and build new dimensions, in just seconds. And, they can add and link in new data, using relationships that are easy to understand and provide unique insights.

Dimensions can rely on other dimensions, or on user inputs, so a single rule change can trigger a cascade of re-derivations and adjustments — just like “Recalc” in a spreadsheet. You can build dynamic models that pivot around every change you make, in real time. Except that Spendata is no spreadsheet — it protects your source data from modification, it records every transformation made in every dimension, and everything it builds and displays is auditable from first principles.

Best of all, when a Spendata cube is republished, all of your work is automatically and seamlessly merged with the new cube.