In this video, you will see some of the commonly used reports for IT Finance and how you can use these reports.

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Hello. My name is Alison, and in this video, I will show you how can you use Apptio reports to review and manage IT spend.

First, log in to your Apptio domain using the credentials provided to you.

This is the Service Costing page, where you can see all the auto-generated reports available in Apptio Cost Transparency.

You can find some of the commonly used reports by IT Finance in these report collections.

As part of the IT Finance team, you are expected to handle some or all of these tasks, and even more. With the help of Apptio reports, you can access the data needed to analyze and manage all your spend categories, and also be ready with all the data required during your monthly reviews.

In this video, I will show you where you can find the data needed to accomplish some of these tasks.

You are primarily required to review and manage your IT spend.

To do this, you might want to see what is driving the fixed vs. variable spend ratio, where are the significant variances between spend and plan happening, which cost centers are driving these variances, etc.

Most of these data can be found in the IT Financials report collection. Let us look at some examples.

Click IT Financials.

The key performance indicators are displayed at the top of the report. These show you the OpEx and CapEx YTD, and how much are these exceeding their respective budget. You can also see what percent of your cost is variable vs. fixed.

Below the KPIs, you can see the YTD OpEx and YTD OpEx Budget variance. You can pivot these charts Cost Pool, Account Group, Cost Center, etc.

Select Cost Pool from the dropdown.

Click Current Month to see the values for this month.

You can see here Hardware, Outside Services, External Labor, Facilities & Power are exceeding their budget. The variance percentage is given here, and you can also see the trend here.

Click any cost pool to drill in to the variance detail for that cost pool. This will help you to point out the accounts that are causing you to be over budget. You can drill in further into each account to see their transactions.

Click Close.

Next, click Cost Pool Analysis.

Here you can see the fixed and variable spend for each cost pool. Software costs are entirely fixed, but Outside Services and External Labor are completely variable spend. To see the exact values, hover your pointer over the bars. Or you can also go to the Details tab.

You can see a summary of your OpEx, CapEx, Fixed, and Variable cost for each cost pool in the Summary table.

Click the home icon to go back to the landing page.

The spend on labor and resources can vary because of different factors. The cost will be different for different skillsets or roles, but the cost for similar skillsets can vary by location and contractors. To manage your labor spend, you will have to keep a track of these differences. You also need to know the difference in cost for internal and external labors, and what is the mix of internal and external labors for each IT function.

Go to the Labor report collection to see data relevant to these.

This chart shows the top labor costs by cost center. You can see the mix of internal labor and external labor costs for each cost center.

The rest of the report shows the labor headcount by cost center details, by role, and by location. In the dropdown for the first chart, select Cost Center and Name. So now you can see the labor headcount for each cost center.

Click Details.

Here you can see the total headcount for each cost center, and if it is over or under the planned headcount. You can also see the internal and external headcount breakup.

If you scroll down, you can see labor headcount by role.

Click Details.

Here you can see the internal and external headcount for each role.

Let us drill into any role to see more details. For example, click Software Engineer. In the dropdown, select Location. So here you can see how your cost is varying for the same role over different locations. For Seattle, the cost is exceeding the budget by 21.9%, while for the other two locations, you are under budget.

Go to Labor Headcount. Here you can see the planned headcount the variance for Software Engineers for each location. To see how much of your headcount for this role is internal vs. external, select Employee Type in the dropdown.

Next, go to Labor Analysis.

On this page, you can see all the labor details – like employee type, role type, cost, headcount, etc. – for each IT function. You can add more details to this table using these column pickers. For example, click Title to add that column to the table.

You can search for a particular cost center by typing in a name over here. For example, let us search for Data Center Ops. Now you can see the mix of internal and external labor for this cost center.

You can also use these slicers to filter the report. Select Austin in the Slice by Location filter. And you can see the results here. Click the funnel icon to clear the filter.

These are some of the questions you may have to address to manage your IT resource towers.

• How can we communicate IT costs in terms of the purpose that the business understands?
• What is the unit cost difference between infrastructure choices?
• How are we performing against unit cost targets?

Let us go to IT Towers.

Here you can see the cost for each IT Tower, broken down by cost pools. And you can see the trend for each in this chart. You can zoom into a specific time period in the chart by clicking and dragging your pointer. Click here to reset the zoom.

Go to the Details tab.

Here you can see the budget variance for each IT Tower cost.

Click an IT Tower name in the table to drill into more details. (Compute)

Go to Quantity & Unit Cost.

For each sub-tower, you can see the monthly unit cost target and its actual average unit cost. The average unit cost for Mainframe is 39.5% more than its monthly target. To see the unit cost trend for Mainframe over the last year, click View. You can also see the change in quantity every month over the last year.

Click Close.

You can compare the unit cost for each sub-tower in this table.

Use the browser’s back button to go back.

If you scroll down, you can see the IT Tower cost by purpose in this pie chart.

You can use this page to communicate your IT Tower costs in terms of purpose that the business can understand. For example, 33.2% of your IT Tower cost is being spent toward delivering business capabilities, and only 3.8% for protecting your systems and intellectual property.

Click the home icon to go back to the landing page.

You can use this report collection to summarize what you have learned from the individual reports. These also make it easy for you to share your findings during the business reviews of your organization.

Click TBM Review.

In the IT Financials section, you can see the key performance indicators like how much of your cost is fixed vs. variable, your OpEx and CapEx YTD, and by what percent are these exceeding their budget.

In this course, you saw some of the commonly used reports for IT Finance and how you can use these reports.