Use this article to understand how Home and Dashboards help teams review overall technology spend and move into deeper analysis.
Start with the full picture
Home is the starting point for understanding technology spend in Yarken.
It gives users a fast view of overall spend, current month performance, trends, variance, cloud spend, labor, vendors, applications, solution offerings, and consumers.
Dashboards extend that view into focused areas of analysis. They help users investigate specific parts of the technology finance model without starting from raw data or building reports from scratch.
What you can do
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Review total spend for the current financial year.
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See current month spend based on the latest loaded data.
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Compare spend against budget and forecast.
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Identify top budget variance by cost pool and tower.
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Review labor, vendor, cloud, application, solution offering, and consumer spend.
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Drill into charts and reports for more detail.
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Use filters to focus dashboards by entity, expense type, time period, or other dimensions.
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Move from executive summary views into deeper analytics.
Home
Home gives users a high-level view of the current state of technology spend.
It shows accumulated spend for the financial year, current month spend, projected full year spend, expected savings, and achieved savings where available.
Current month refers to the latest month with available spend data in the current financial year, not necessarily the current calendar month.
Home also helps users understand how spend is distributed, how it is trending, where variance is appearing, and which areas may need further review.
Dashboards
Dashboards provide structured views into specific areas of technology spend.
Users can review dashboards for areas such as finance overview, cost transparency, tower spend, vendor spend, cloud, labor, applications, solution offerings, consumers, and other configured reporting views.
Dashboards are useful when teams need a consistent view for recurring analysis, leadership review, operating cadence, or specific financial questions.
Many dashboard charts support drilldown. Users can select a chart segment or grouping to move into more detailed reports while keeping the selected context.
How teams use Home and Dashboards
Teams typically begin on Home to identify where attention is needed.
If a cost pool is driving budget variance, they can move into a relevant dashboard or report to understand the details. If cloud spend is rising, they can review cloud vendor spend, cloud application spend, or cloud as a percentage of total IT spend. If consumer spend is increasing, they can investigate solution offerings and consumers.
Home gives the signal. Dashboards help teams investigate it.
What makes it different
Home and Dashboards are connected to the same Yarken model used across analytics, planning, chargeback, and Ask Yarken.
That means dashboard views are not isolated snapshots. They reflect the same cost pools, towers, vendors, applications, consumers, entities, budgets, forecasts, and actuals used elsewhere in the platform.
This gives teams a consistent way to move from summary level visibility into deeper analysis and action.
When to use Home and Dashboards
Use Home when you need a fast read on overall technology spend and current performance.
Use dashboards when you want structured analysis of a known area.
Use drilldowns when a chart or summary number needs deeper explanation.
Use Analytics when you need more flexible exploration beyond the standard dashboard view.
For detailed step by step instructions on using Home, dashboards, filters, drilldowns, and reports, refer to the relevant user guides.
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