Sarah Marion, Author at Float

What are Savings Insights?

Savings Insights is a powerful new tool that gives you monthly suggestions on how to save money on your company’s software spending. Our intelligent software scans for Increased Spend, Duplicate Subscriptions, and Similar Subscriptions, and provides you with valuable insights to reduce your costs.

Spot Significant Increases in Spend

Increased Spend Insights is designed to notify you of any unexpected billing increases, large jumps in tool usage, or potential double-charges. If your monthly spend on a particular software tool suddenly increases by a significant amount, Float will flag it as an Increased Spend Insight so you can investigate and take action if necessary to keep your costs low.

Find Savings Across Teams

Duplicate Subscriptions identifies any software subscriptions that are duplicated across two or more employees. Duplicate subscriptions can often be consolidated into one account with a larger discount, or can be eliminated altogether to save costs.

Eliminate Waste and Streamline Subscriptions

Similar Subscriptions identifies software tools that provide overlapping features. If you have two or more software subscriptions that perform similar functions, Float will flag them as Similar Subscriptions giving you the opportunity to cancel one or more of these subscriptions altogether, which can lead to significant cost savings over time.

Float’s Savings Insights feature is designed to help businesses optimize their software spending by identifying potential cost-saving opportunities. By providing actionable insights into your company’s software expenses, Float can help you save money, streamline your subscriptions, and increase your overall efficiency.

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Already a Professional Float customer? Log in today and start saving by going to the Reporting page. You can mark an Insight as actioned for that month only to continue to get updates on that merchant in subsequent months, or mute an Insight forever if you’re comfortable with the spending and don’t want to receive future alerts. Savings Insights are automatically enabled for all Professional Plan customers and are located at the bottom of the Reporting page – learn more about Savings Insights at our Help Centre here.

Not a Float customer (yet)? To improve the way you manage your company’s subscriptions, book a demo with us today! Our team is happy to walk you through our smart corporate cards and spend management software.

April 2024 Update: Both Spenders and Managers in Float can now also easily monitor budgets and control spending with access to Reporting.

Managing company finances is challenging, especially when it comes to tracking expenses and understanding where money is being spent.

For a lot of Canadian companies, that can lead to delayed reaction times in response to spending anomalies and difficulty tracking budgets against actuals in real-time. Not to mention the wasted time compiling data across sources and manually reconciling missing expense information.

At Float, we understand these hurdles for finance teams (in fact, we all take turns closing the books).

That’s why we’re excited to launch Float’s new Reporting feature – the smartest solution for Canadian finance teams looking for more visibility and control over their corporate card programs. With Reporting, you get access to spending data as soon as a transaction is made, giving you the information you need to:

Track and manage budgets 📈
Make informed decisions about spending 🧐
Find cost (and time) savings 🔍

Ready to learn more about how Reporting can help you drive savings through real-time visibility? Let’s dive in.

📈Track trends and spot anomalies as they happen

Every transaction made on a Float card is automatically tracked (and coded) in real-time. With Reporting, teams get an up-to-date understanding of company expenses with access to analytics and reporting tools to optimize spending and drive savings.

From the Reporting page, Admins will see a snapshot of company spending and be able to analyze trends over time. With financial data visualizations of both CAD and USD spending, you can view month-to-date spending and quickly identify increases or decreases in spending patterns. This allows for quick identification of any unusual or unexpected spending so your team can act quickly and track team actuals against budgets.

As an added bonus, Float sends out weekly Spend Snapshots to your email to keep you in the loop on spending and give you a quick link to explore further.

Managers in Float can also easily monitor budgets and control spending with access to Reporting. A Manager is a user role between Admins and Spenders that can approve Team spending in Float, and with Reporting, they can now view their Team’s monthly spend patterns and identify anomalies or large increases from specific vendors or Spenders on their team.

🔍 Dig into spend by merchant, GL code, or cardholder

Admins can also run custom spend reports by merchant, vendor, GL code, category, cardholder, team, or tag to get a more detailed understanding of where company money is going. This level of insight can help finance teams identify areas of overspending or opportunities for cost savings.

🧾Find expenses with missing information

For anyone responsible for reconciling expenses or closing books, Reporting can help quickly identify transactions with missing expense codes. You can use this customized view to code your transactions in bulk, export them with all your data (including receipts!) and close the books faster. And with Float’s automated accounting features like Transaction rules, you can automate these expense codes, and benefit from more accurate real-time reporting the next month.

💡 How our customers use Reporting

Our team has been working closely with customers to solve issues around tracking spending, spotting anomalies, and reconciling transactions. Our customers use Reporting to give them the confidence to enable more employees to spend and to quickly make fact-based decisions in real-time. We recently asked Gino Cacciatore, CFO of Skybox Labs, how Reporting has impacted his team’s ability to monitor spending and create interim reports. Here’s what he had to say:

“In the past I was reviewing the spending daily to spot any anomalies or large spends that required further analysis. We were not following up at month end to look at any trends or patterns in the spending by customer or by buyer.

[Reporting] adds another check and balance to our arsenal that we didn’t have before.
Gino Cacciatore, CFO, Skybox Labs

Reporting allows us to run a single report by customer or buyer to see if any patterns exist that need further review. For example two large charges to a single vendor for the month when we would expect only one. It was easy to spot that a team had doubled their spend at a vendor in a single month and we were able to discuss and resolve the increased spend.

My team can now analyze company spending quickly and easily. It adds another check and balance to our arsenal that we didn’t have before.”

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Float’s new Reporting feature provides a powerful tool for finance teams to better understand and manage company spending. With real-time insights, your team can optimize spending and make more informed decisions to help the company achieve its goals. To get an in-depth overview of how to get the most out of Float’s new Reporting page, watch our video below.

If you’re a Float customer on our Professional plan, admins and bookkeepers can log in today to get a full view of your company’s spending. Not a customer (yet)? If your team is looking for instant access to real-time insights and better control over corporate card spending, reach out. We’ve helped thousands of Canadian businesses optimize their spend and find savings.

Author: Sarah Marion

Spend Less with Float’s Savings Insights