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Estimated Read Time: 10 minutes
Sections in this Article
Getting Started
Choosing your Annual Calculation Period
Enabling Automatic Reconciliation
Customising your Spend Module
Adding Spend
Automating Spend
Adding Spend Via our NetSuite Integration
Quick Introduction - What is the Spend Module?
When using the "vanilla" Gatekeeper (i.e. without the Spend module), there are a few ways you can track Monetary Values of agreements & obligations...
The simplest way to do this is to populate the "Annual Contract Value" field for all your Contracts
With this single field populated, Gatekeeper can show you value summaries in Dashboards, Repository tables, within Contract records and you even get a nice summary within your Vendor records too, showing you totals of all agreements held
Pictured below: Some of the dashboards & views where Contract Values are displayed
However, these Annual Value calculations are not designed to be perfect indications of expenditure - they're more useful to give users an indication of approximate/expected value
Thus comes the question:
Can Gatekeeper be used to track expected contract expenditure, as well as actual current expenditure and can this be used to plan budgets, calculate operating costs etc?
➡️ This is where the Spend module comes in!
How does Spend do this?
At its core, the Spend module gives you an extra set of data you can link to your Vendors & Contracts to track individual payments
Not only does this give you visibility of those payments alongside your other key Gatekeeper data like Legal Obligations & Risk, but the Spend module provides you with insights & calculations which can help you planning budgets or assessing how "in-control" you are of expenditure.
What the Spend Module provides (simplified)
- An additional customisable Data Set (Spend records) linked to your Vendors - which also comes with the ability to allocate Spend to specific Contracts too
- Spend Calculation Summaries within each Vendor & Contract record
- A Spend Dashboard (& other Spend Reporting Options)
To get a full summary of the reporting, analytics & insights available when using the Spend module, visit our dedicated article here:
📘 Appendix: All Core Spend Fields
| Field | Definition | Calculation details |
| Forecast: Contract Annual Value | How much you are expected to spend on contracts each year | Sum of all Pipeline/Live Contract "Annual Values" |
| Annual Direct Spend: All Entries | How much you have spent with your vendors in the current reporting period | |
| Annual Direct Spend allocated to Contracts | Same as above but only spend which has been linked to a Contract as well as a Vendor | |
| Direct Spend | Expenditure in the current annual year |
Sum of all direct Spend for the current vendor in the current annual period Spend linked to archived contracts will be excluded |
| Annual Direct Spend All Entries less Forecast | The difference between actual spend entries vs the sum of Contract Annual Values | |
| Indirect Spend |
Spend which has been paid to another vendor but the current vendor is involved* in the provision of the goods/services |
Sum of all Spend Entries within the current Spend period where the current vendor is listed as the Indirect Vendor |
| Annual Direct Spend allocated to Contracts less Forecast | ||
| All Time Spend | All Spend Entries, regardless of Contract links, Spend Period, past or future, Direct or Indirect |
*This should not be confused with the concept of Indirect Spend referring to costs not directly associated with your provision of Goods & Services
This refers to expenditure where your payment does not directly go to the listed Vendor
For Example, if buying laptops from an office-supply vendor, you could list "Apple" as the Indirect Vendor since they are ultimately providing the goods, but you are not directly paying them
Getting Started ✅
Enabling the Module
Once Spend has been added to your subscription, the module can be enabled/disabled by Configuration Admins here:
Step 1) Go to Modules > Spend
Step 2) Set Spend Module Configuration to 
Enabled
If you do not have this module and wish to discuss upgrading (or if you have recently purchased this module and cannot access this configuration screen) please reach out to your CSM or contact our Customer Success Team
Enabling Automatic Reconciliation
You may notice as you visit the various Reporting pages of the Spend module that one area it offers insights is based on the Contracts which are linked to the spend entries
Linking Contracts while adding Spend can increase the complexity of the import process - especially if using Bulk Import via CSV or Automatic Import via API - therefore you can use a setting that will allow Gatekeeper to link Spend entries to some Contract records to for you
With this setting enabled, whenever you import (via bulk import/API) new Spend for Vendors with only 1 Live Contract, Gatekeeper will assume the Spend must be part of that contract and automatically link it for you
Pictured Example - A Spend record being added via bulk import which automatically links to the Vendor's only Contract record after the import is completed
Step 1) Go to Modules > Spend
Step 2) Set Reconciliation from 
Manual to 
Auto
Enabling Project Spend
If you are using Projects to track sets of Contracts/Vendors relationships, you can leverage Spend to include a budget for the Project
Once you enable this setting below, a new "Spend Status" summary will show on the Project dashboard to give you visibility of available budget
Step 1) Go to Modules > Spend
Step 2) Set Spend Module Configuration to Enabled
Customising Your Spend Module 🛠️
Changing your Annual Calculation Period
When adding Spend Entries to your repository, you will see that assigning the Date that the Spend occurred is mandatory
This date plays a key role in the insights Gatekeeper provides to assist you in tracking & planning your budgets
As such, you also need to decide which dates should be included in the various calculations & summaries provided by Gatekeeper
Step 1) Go to Modules > Spend
Step 2) Below, Annual Calculation, hit "Change"
Step 3) Select your desired period, then hit ✅ Save
Calculation Period Options 📆
12-Month Rolling
This works exactly as you would expect. Any Spend records dated within the last 365 days will be included in the calculations for any Spend dashboards/summaries
Calendar Year
With this setting, any Spend records occurring from January 1st of the current year until the current date will be included in the calculations for any Spend dashboards/summaries
Custom - Pro-Rata
This works much like "Calendar Year" but allows you to choose when your year begins.
For instance, you may prefer to start your year on April 5th to coincide with the Financial Year if this is how you to plan your budgets
After you have set your Custom Start/End date for the year, this option will include any Spend entries which land between the date you set and the current date
Custom - Full Year
Similar to above, this allows you to change the date at which your financial year starts/ends
Unlike above, this option will only include spend calculations from the last complete year
Amending Spend Core Field Labels
👋 ensure you understand the calculations & summaries affected by these labels before making changes
There may be some Spend Calculations which does not match how you organisation already classifies Spend. If so, you can amend the labels of the Core Spend fields to make them easier to understand for you & your users
Step 1) Go to Modules > Spend
Step 2) At the bottom of the page, find the field label you wish to amend
Step 3) Click the 
menu icon & hit Edit
Step 4) Enter the revised label "Translation" & hit ✅ Save
Adding Custom Spend Fields
We advise you to look at the Spend data model to get an understanding of the fields which come prebuilt for your Spend entries.
Once you have done this, if you notice that there are fields you need to capture in Gatekeeper which do not exist in the standard data model, you can follow the below steps to add extra fields
Step 1) Go to Settings > Configuration > Custom Data
Step 2) Hit Add > Custom Group to add a new data group
Or you can select an existing Custom Spend Group & skip to Step 5
Step 3) Name this Group & select Allocated to: Spend
Step 4) Hit ✅ Save
Step 5) Hit ➕ Add New Custom Field
Step 6) Populate the field Label & Type, then hit ✅ Save
Repeat Steps 5 - 6 until all your new fields have been added to the data model
💡 Some examples of some new fields you may want to add could be:
- Payment Requested Date - Date
- Expected/Budgeted Expenditure - Yes/No
- Payment Type - Dropdown List:
- Invoice
- Expense
- Fine/Penalty
- Tax/VAT
- Expenditure Category - Dropdown List:
- Operational
- Financial Services/Expenses
- Legal and Regulatory
- Capital
- Other
- Payment Source Account - Dropdown List:
- Main TXN Execution Account
- Main Current Account
- Expense Account
- Creditors - UK
- Creditors - EU
- Creditors - APAC
- Creditors - US
- Other
Adding Spend ➕
This section refers to ways you can add Spend yourself as a Gatekeeper user
These methods are recommended as steps to follow when first setting up your Spend module...
...Once you have all your historical spend imported via these means, we recommend setting up a more automted method for having Spend added to Gatekeeper via one of the below options ⬇️
Manually Adding Spend
Step 1) Open a Vendor record from within your Vendor repository
Step 2) Hit Add > Spend
Step 3) Populate the Spend metadata & hit ✅ Save
Mandatory Values: Date, Currency, Amount
💡 After you hit ✅ Save, Gatekeeper will automatically load up a new line for you to continue adding Spend entries for the Vendor, but you do not need to populate any more
Bulk Adding Spend
Step 1) Go to your Vendor repository
Step 2) Hit Add > Import Spend
Step 3) Hit Download Template ⬇️ to get a CSV file with all your Spend fields as columns
Step 4) Populate this template using Excel/Google Sheets, mapping your existing Spend data to the Gatekeeper template's format
Step 5) Download your populated template as a new CSV file
Step 6) Return to the Gatekeeper import page & upload this populated CSV file
Currently, bulk exporting & re-importing Spend (for the purposes of updating existing Spend records) is not possible
To get notified when this is developed, please upvote this idea 💡
Automating Spend Imports ⚙️
Once you have set up & imported all your current & historical Spend data to Gatekeeper, we recommend creating a failsafe process to ensure Gatekeeper is kept up to date so you can rely on the insights & intelligence it provides
If you do not have the resources to automate this, you can perform a bulk import on a regular schedule (e.g. once per month/quarter)
However, we recommend the below methods which require less manual effort as well as fewer delays/periods of inconsistency between your systems!
💡 You will notice this is different to how we recommend managing your Vendor/Contracts - which we suggest you do in Gatekeeper
This is because the majority of our clients will have separate Finance/ERP software tools which they use for payments & budgets but don't want to force you to upheave those in favour of Gatekeeper
Adding Spend Via Zapier
Zapier is a web-based "Do it yourself" API tool
You can use Zapier to create "Zaps" - these are rules which you can give to Zapier which it will use to take data from your Financial tool and push this data into Gatekeeper
You can search to see whether your other solution has a Zapier integration here:
Adding Spend Via the Gatekeeper API
If your other financial solution does not have a Zapier integration, or if your organisation have an Integrations/BA team who usually handles the connections between software tools in your tech stack, you can leverage our open API to push data into Gatekeeper (or pull data from Gatekeeper)
👋 Gatekeeper's openAPI access is only included in Enterprise plans
If you wish to discuss upgrading or adding this as a "bolt-on" to your plan, please reach out to your CSM or contact our Customer Success Team here
Adding Spend Via our NetSuite Integration
When you have connected our native NetSuite integration, we allow you to automatically push Paid invoices back to Gatekeeper as "Spend"
This forms the final piece of the Gatekeeper-NetSuite Integration
See our 📖 NetSuite Integration Configuration Guide for more information
FAQs 💬
Q: What happens if we add Spend entries with a Date in the future
A: This is valid and fine to do.
However, Gatekeeper will not include these entries in any of the summaries / dashboards / calculations / reporting until the date is passed
...except for the "All Time Spend" field
Q: How frequently is data updated via the Gatekeeper Suiteapp connection?
A: Data is updated hourly.
Q: Do Spend records need to be linked to Contract records?
A: No. Spend only needs to be linked to Vendors. However, many insights provided by the Spend dashboards & calculations are greatly improved by linking them to Contracts (where possible)
Pictured below: the Spend dashboard & Vendor Record calculations which are directly influenced by Spend entries which are linked Contract records
Q: Can we view/add spend during Workflows?
A: Not yet. If this is an important feature for you, please upvote this Ideas Forum post:
Additional Reading 📚
Get more insights into the reports & KPIs visible within the Spend Dashboard
Discover more about our Zapier integration & how you can use this to automate your data synchronisation between you systems
Learn more about how to create customisable data summary views to easily review (and export) your contract & vendor data - including associated Spend values!