The basis for determining an organization’s purchasing patterns is conducting a spend analysis and building a spend profile. A well-done spend profile will reveal things like the amount of money your organization spends on each category of goods and services it purchases, the amount of money spent with each supplier, changes in spend over time, and other valuable information. Further analyzing that spend can help you determine opportunities for implementing cost savings practices like supplier consolidation, strategic sourcing, and standardization. Spend analysis can be conducted using a variety of tools, from deploying the most cutting-edge source-to-pay software to using PivotTables in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.