Today Basware announced anew product called Basware Analytics, designed to provide insightsinto organization-wide spending. Basware is a Finland-based vendorof procure-to-pay solutions and the Basware Commerce Network, whichprovides connectivity tools to streamline collaboration betweenbuyers and suppliers. Based on Tableau analytics software, BaswareAnalytics will provide data visualization, a slate of standardreports, and the ability to develop custom reports. All threefront-end options will give a customer's end users role-specificinsights into all the invoicing and procurement data that thecompany stores in other Basware solutions.

A finance manager will be able to use the tool to view spendingat the organization-wide level, then drill down into that data inany which way—to look at spending by individual, by department, orby product, for example. At the same time, the finance manager willbe able to seamlessly compare actual spending to budgets in realtime.

For treasury and accounts payable (A/P) staff, the solutionpromises a view into upcoming cash outflows at the time theliabilities are incurred, which may be several weeks before theinvoice arrives. In addition to enhancing cash forecasting, thismay provide opportunities to seek discounts for early payment.

Because the tool was developed specifically for theprocure-to-pay process, it more easily offers a high degree ofgranularity than do more general-purpose business intelligence (BI)tools, according to Basware. And unlike some spend analytics tools,it marries procurement data with A/P and budgeting information.Basware Analytics will be available on June 10.