Explore Tile: Spend

What Spend shows

Spend answers one question: what are you actually paying your vendor stack, right now, every month? Verinode builds this entirely from your active vendor relationships, specifically the committed monthly amount recorded against each one. It is not a historical ledger of every invoice you have ever paid. It is a live read of your current run rate: what would keep charging you next month if nothing changed.

This article covers two places you will see it: the Spend tile in the Explore row on the Vendors home page, and the Spend tab inside the Vendors card slider, which holds the full breakdown, category bars, and vendor list.

Where to find it

Open Vendors from the sidebar at iq.verinode.ai/vendors. Two places lead into Spend:

• The Spend tile, one of five tiles in the Explore row on the Vendors home page (alongside All Vendors, Avg Score, Coverage, and Renewals). It carries a teal accent.
• Clicking that tile opens the Vendors card slider directly to the Spend tab, one of five tabs across the top: Findings, Stack, Coverage, Spend, Renewals.

The Spend Explore tile

What it is. A compact summary tile that mirrors the Spend tab's headline number so you can read your monthly run rate without opening the slider.

What you see. The tile's main value is your total monthly spend across active vendors, formatted as a rounded dollar figure (for example, "$4.2k" or "$180k" once the total crosses a thousand or a million dollars). Underneath, the label reads "per month." Behind the number, when there is enough spend data, a small distribution preview draws a bar for each of your seven biggest monthly vendor costs, largest first, so the shape of your spend (a handful of big line items versus many small ones) is visible before you even click in.

What it means. This is the same monthly total that appears at the top of the Vendors home page, under the vendor count headline, labeled "Monthly Spend, Across Active Vendors." All three surfaces (the hero panel stat, this Explore tile, and the Spend tab's own KPI) are the same number, read from the same source: the sum of current_amount_cents across every vendor relationship whose status is active. Vendors marked inactive do not count.

Click it. Clicking the Spend tile opens the Vendors slider to the Spend tab, described below.

Empty state. If you have no active vendors with a recorded monthly amount, the tile shows a dash (", ") instead of a dollar figure, and no distribution preview draws.

The Spend tab

Open the tab (via the Spend tile, or directly inside the slider) and you get the full picture in four parts, stacked top to bottom: a KPI row, a category breakdown, a filter bar, and a sortable vendor list.

KPI row

Three tiles, side by side:

• Monthly spend. Your current total monthly commitment across active vendors, shown as a plain dollar figure (for example, "$4,231"). The subline reads "N active vendors," the count of vendor relationships feeding the total. If there is no recorded spend, this reads ", ."
• Annualized. The monthly total multiplied by 12, shown rounded (for example, "$50.7k"). The subline reads "12-month projection." This is a straight-line projection of today's commitments, not a forecast that accounts for renewals, cancellations, or price changes ahead.
• Avg cost / seat. The average monthly cost per seat, averaged only across vendors that have both a recorded monthly amount and a seat count on file (a seat is a software vendor's per-user or per-license count, not a franchise membership). The subline reads "across seat-based vendors" when the figure is available, or "add seats to vendors to see" when no vendor in your stack has a seat count recorded yet.

By Category breakdown

Below the KPI row, a "By Category" section lists every vendor category with recorded spend, ranked by dollars, largest first. Each row is a clickable bar showing:

• The category name (for example, "Software" or "Equipment Rental"). A vendor without an assigned category rolls up under "Uncategorized."
• The monthly total for that category, its share of your overall spend as a percentage, and the number of vendors contributing to it (for example, "$1,850/mo · 44% · 3 vendors").
• A horizontal bar underneath, filled proportional to that category's spend relative to your single biggest category (so the top row always reads as a full bar, and the rest scale beneath it).

Click a category bar to filter the vendor list below to just that category. The bar highlights with a copper border and tint while selected. Click it again to remove that one filter, or use the "Clear category filter" link (with a count of how many are active) in the filter bar to reset all of them at once. You can select more than one category at a time; the vendor list shows vendors matching any of the selected categories.

This section is hidden entirely when there is no spend to break down (no active vendor has a recorded monthly amount).

Filter bar

A single search field, placeholder text "Search vendors…", filters the vendor list below by vendor name as you type. It works together with any category selection: a vendor has to match both the search text and the selected categories (if any) to show up in the list.

When one or more categories are selected, a "Clear category filter (N)" link appears next to the search field, where N is the number of categories currently selected. Clicking it resets the category filter without touching your search text.

Vendor list

The full list of active vendors, sorted by monthly cost, highest first, and narrowed by whatever search or category filters are active. Each row shows:

• The vendor's logo (or a generated placeholder when no logo is available) and name.
• Underneath the name, the vendor's category, followed by its seat count when one is recorded (for example, "Software · 12 seats").
• On the right, the vendor's monthly cost (for example, "$450/mo"), or a dash if no amount is on file.
• Below the cost, that vendor's share of your total monthly spend as a percentage (for example, "10.6% of total"), calculated against the unfiltered total, not the filtered subset.

1. 1Scan the list top to bottom. Because it is sorted by cost, your biggest vendor commitments are always at the top, regardless of any filter.
2. 2Click a category bar above to narrow the list to one part of your stack, for example just Software or just Equipment Rental.
3. 3Click a vendor row to open that vendor's detail view, where you can see its full relationship record, including score, renewal date, and contract terms.
4. 4Use the search field when you know the vendor name and just want to jump straight to its row.

Empty state. If no vendor matches your current search and category filters, the list reads "No vendors match the current filters." The same message shows if you have no active vendors with recorded spend at all, since an empty stack and an over-filtered stack look the same to the list.

The history note

Under the vendor list, a small note reads:

"12-month payment trend chart builds as invoices are ingested and parsed to pii.parsed_documents. For now, totals reflect current committed monthlys."

This is Verinode being direct about a gap rather than hiding it. Everything above is built from your vendors' current committed monthly amount, the number you'd expect to pay next month if nothing changed. A month-by-month trend line of what you actually paid historically is a separate build that depends on your invoices being ingested and parsed. As more of your vendor invoices flow in, that history fills in behind the scenes; nothing you do in the Spend tab itself builds it.

Best-practice example

Say your Explore tile reads "$6.8k, per month" with a distribution preview showing one tall bar and several shorter ones. Open the Spend tab: the KPI row confirms $6,800/mo across 14 active vendors, annualizing to about $82k. The By Category breakdown shows Software at 51% of total spend across 4 vendors, well ahead of everything else. Click that category bar to narrow the vendor list to just those 4 rows, sorted by cost. The top row is your biggest single software line item, often worth checking against its seat count (the Avg cost/seat KPI) to see whether you are paying for more seats than you are actually using. That single row, cross-referenced against the vendor's own detail view (score, renewal date), is usually the fastest read on where a renegotiation or a cut would move the needle most.

Related reading

• Explore Tile: Coverage (Stack vs Archetype)
• Understanding your margin
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data
• The decision workspace

Data sources