The Spend over time report

Spend over time answers a question the single headline figure cannot: not just what you spend now, but how you got here and where you are heading. It is its own page in the Reports menu, and it is reconstructed entirely from your price-change history, so it stays truthful without you having to keep an old spreadsheet of what things used to cost.

Each tool contributes a line to the total. A tool with no price changes is a flat line at its current annualised cost. A tool with applied changes steps at each change's effective date, using the before and after figures recorded at the time. A tool with a scheduled future change projects its line forward from today, so a rise you have already logged shows up as an upcoming step rather than a surprise.

The chart adds those lines into one stepped curve of total annualised spend. It steps up when costs rose and down when they fell, and the flat stretches are the periods when nothing changed. Reading it left to right tells the story of your estate's cost, and the section to the right of today is your forward projection built from scheduled changes.

As everywhere in Reports, spend is annualised so different billing cycles compare fairly, one-off purchases sit at zero because they have no yearly run-rate, and figures are never summed across currencies. If your estate spans more than one currency you get a currency toggle, and each currency draws its own line with its own current total.

To read a value rather than a shape, use the figures underneath the chart. Hovering a point on the line shows the date and the annualised total at that point, and Show the figures behind this chart opens the same series as a table, one row per point plotted, in the currency you are viewing. The chart also describes itself to a screen reader with the date range, the opening and closing totals and the highest point, so the report can be followed without seeing it.

Spend over time is part of the paid spend-analytics features, so on the free plan the page shows an upgrade prompt. To make the projection useful, keep your price changes up to date - the report is only ever as forward-looking as the changes you have recorded.