Spend Lens takes the last 12 months of your purchase orders and answers four questions:
How much am I spending, and with whom?
How concentrated is my spend across suppliers?
Which materials am I buying from a single vendor, with no backup?
Where have prices gone up, and what has that actually cost me?
You'll find it under Procurement → Spend Lens.
Before you start
Spend Lens analyzes purchase order data that Ply already has. To see meaningful results, your account needs purchasing history in Ply, either created directly in Ply or synced from a connected system (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, or your accounting software).
If Spend Lens looks empty or sparse, the most common reason is that there isn't enough PO history in the analysis window yet.
Three things to know before reading any number
These three rules explain almost every question people have about Spend Lens.
1. Spend is dated when the cost becomes final
A purchase order is counted in the month its cost is finalized at reconciliation, not the month you created it.
Example. You create a PO on March 28, receive the material on April 2, and reconcile it on April 5. That spend shows up in April, not March.
This is why a PO can appear to "move" from one month to another: it moved when you reconciled it.
2. The window is a rolling 12 months
Spend Lens always looks at the last 12 months from your most recent purchasing activity. It is not a calendar year and not your fiscal year. The date range is shown at the top of the page, for example:
430 purchase orders · 51 suppliers · Aug 01, 2025 – Jul 30, 2026
3. Numbers refresh overnight
Spend Lens recalculates every night. Two things change as a result: new purchasing activity gets included, and the 12-month window rolls forward by a day, so the oldest day drops off.
This means your totals will look slightly different tomorrow than they do today, even if you don't create a single PO. That's expected.
Two ways to view the same data
In the top right corner you can switch between two modes. Both use identical data, they just present it differently.
Mode | Best for |
Demo (narrative) | Walking someone through the findings. Four guided screens, one question each. |
Explore (modular) | Doing the work. Full dashboard with charts, filters, search, and export. |
Demo mode: the four screens
Screen 1 - Spend Baseline
"Where is the money going?"
The opening picture, with no analysis yet. Three numbers:
Total spend over the trailing 12 months
Purchase orders sent in that window
Suppliers - how many distinct vendors you bought from
Example. $1,270,488 across 430 purchase orders to 51 suppliers.
This is the surface. The next three screens break it apart.
Screen 2 - Supplier Concentration
"How concentrated is it?"
This screen ranks your top suppliers by spend and shows each one's share - that supplier's spend divided by your total spend.
Example. If a supplier accounts for $480,464 of $1,270,488 in total spend, their share is 37.8%.
Concentration cuts both ways, and it's worth holding both ideas at once:
It's leverage. A supplier who depends on a large share of your volume has a reason to give you better terms.
It's risk. If that same supplier raises prices or has a supply problem, you feel it immediately.
Read the PO count alongside the share. Two suppliers with similar spend can represent completely different relationships.
Example.
Supplier A: 15 POs, $480,464 (37.8% share) - about $32,000 per order. Supplier B: 33 POs, $139,866 (11% share) - about $4,200 per order.
Supplier A is your strategic relationship: few orders, very large. That's the vendor to sit down and negotiate with.
Supplier B is routine replenishment.
At the bottom of this screen, a warning tells you how many materials came from a single supplier with 3 or more line items over the 12-month window. Those are your concentration risks, and the next screen goes into them.
Screen 3 - Single-Source SKUs
"Where are you locked into one vendor?"
This is a list of materials you bought from exactly one supplier in the last 90 days, ranked by 90-day spend so the biggest dollars at risk appear first.
Being single-sourced creates two separate problems:
Supply risk. If that vendor stocks out, you have no fallback and work stops.
Pricing risk. With no competing quote, you have nothing to negotiate against.
Example. A T-hinge with $2,738 in 90-day spend from one vendor sits above a galvanized tee with $433 from the same vendor.
Start at the top - that's where the exposure is largest.
A useful way to read the list: look at the supplier column, not just the material column. Eight single-sourced materials that all come from two vendors isn't eight problems to solve - it's two conversations to have.
This screen is a diagnostic. Ply doesn't automatically request competing quotes; the list is there so you know exactly where to start looking for a second source.
Screen 4 - Price Increases
"Where are your prices climbing?"
This screen ranks materials by 90-day price impact, and this is the single most important concept in Spend Lens.
Price impact is not the percentage increase. It's the price change multiplied by how much you actually bought.
Example.
Material A went up 40%, but you bought two of them: impact is a few dollars. Material B went up 6%, and you bought 4,000 of them: impact is thousands.
Material B belongs at the top of your list, even though A has the bigger percentage.
That's why this screen sorts by dollars, not by percent. It tells you where a price increase actually hurt.
Below the table, a price history chart plots the selected material over time. Dotted lines mark the recent 90-day average and the prior 90-day average, and each point is color-coded by supplier, so you can see not just that the price moved, but which vendor it moved with.
Explore mode: the full dashboard
The four summary cards
Card | What it means |
12-mo spend | Total spend and PO count for the window. |
Suppliers | Distinct vendors, plus what share your top 3 represent. |
Single-source SKUs | Materials bought from one vendor with 3+ line items over 12 months. |
Comparison opportunities | Materials where the price spread across your suppliers exceeds 20%. |
Comparison opportunities is the most immediately actionable number on this page, and it doesn't have its own screen in Demo mode. Each one is a material where you're already buying from more than one supplier and paying meaningfully different prices for the same thing. That's savings available without finding a new vendor.
Think of it as the mirror image of Single-source SKUs: single-source means no alternatives, comparison opportunities means you have alternatives and aren't using the best one.
Supplier share and Monthly PO spend
The donut shows how spend is distributed across vendors. The bar chart shows total PO spend by month across the trailing 12 months.
Use the monthly chart to spot outliers. A single month that towers over the others usually means one of three things: a genuine seasonal buy, a large one-time project, or a data issue. All three are worth knowing about.
Example.
If eleven months average around $65,000 and one month shows $548,000, don't assume inflation.
Open that month in the export and look at which supplier drove it, often it's a single large order.
This also connects to purchasing strategy: if you can see that a material reliably climbs in a given season, you can buy ahead of the increase instead of into it.
PO List tab
The full table of purchase orders: date, PO number, supplier, line count, PO total, status, and cycle time.
Two things to know about how to read it:
Greyed-out rows are POs that haven't been received or reconciled yet. Their cost and cycle time aren't final and may change.
Cycle is how long the PO took to complete (shown as
<1h,21h,2.1d). A dash means the cycle isn't closed yet.
You can filter by supplier, search by PO number, item number, or material, and export the results.
Material breakdown tab
This tab switches the view from purchase orders to materials. For each material it compares the prior 90 days against the recent 90 days:
Column | Meaning |
Prior 90D | Average unit price in the earlier period |
Recent 90D | Average unit price in the most recent period |
90D increase | Percentage change between the two |
90D impact | Dollar effect, accounting for how much you bought |
Decreases show here too, with a negative impact - this isn't only bad news. A material that dropped 22% shows up as money you didn't spend.
The "Data entry fixes" panel
At the bottom of Material breakdown you'll find a highlighted panel listing materials that were excluded from the price comparison because their pricing looks like a unit-of-measure mistake.
Why this happens. The same material gets entered once as a per-piece price and once as a per-box price. Ply sees the same item number going from $1.10 to $95.55 and can't tell whether that's a real increase or a data problem, so it sets it aside rather than reporting a fake 8,000% jump.
Each entry shows the price range and the spread, so you can see immediately which line is wrong.
Example. A fitting listed at $1.10 – $95.55, spread 8,586% almost certainly has one line priced per box and the rest per piece.
Fix the unit on those lines and the material rejoins the comparison on the next nightly refresh.
The panel also tells you how many materials are currently comparable versus how many need fixing, if a large share are flagged, cleaning them up will substantially improve everything Spend Lens shows you.
Exporting your data
The Export button in Explore mode produces an Excel workbook with six sheets, ordered from summary to detail:
Sheet | One row per | What it adds |
Summary | Metric | Headline totals and the exact date window analyzed |
Notes | Topic | Definitions for how each figure is calculated |
Suppliers | Supplier | Every vendor, not just the top 5 |
Monthly Trend | Supplier × month | Lets you see who drove each month |
Purchase Orders | Purchase order | Full PO detail with cost breakdown |
Line Items | Line item | The atomic level — every material on every PO |
What the export gives you that the dashboard doesn't
The Suppliers sheet is the biggest addition. Alongside spend and share, it includes:
Line count and distinct materials: how deep the relationship goes, not just how expensive
Median cycle hours: how long that supplier typically takes to close out
First PO date and last PO date
Spend last 90 / prior 90 / trend %: momentum per supplier
Example of why that matters. A supplier can be your #2 by annual spend and still have nearly stopped: $139,866 for the year, but only $27 in the last 90 days against $3,733 in the prior 90. Annual spend alone would never show you that the relationship went quiet.
The Monthly Trend sheet breaks each month down by supplier and adds average PO cost, which is useful for spotting a shift from many small orders to a few large ones.
The Purchase Orders sheet shows the full cost build-up: Materials Subtotal + Additional Charges + Other Charges = PO Total. Other Charges can be negative when a credit or discount applies.
Two things to expect in the export
1. It includes every PO status, including drafts. The export applies no status filter. Drafts, declined, and canceled POs are all in there. If you want committed spend only, filter the PO Status column to exclude DRAFT, DECLINED, and CANCELED.
This is the most common reason an export total doesn't match the dashboard.
2. Custom status labels appear as you named them. If your team uses custom board columns, those labels come through as free text exactly as written, so filtering by status means filtering by your own naming, not a standard list.
3. Blank cells in Spend Trend are intentional. The trend percentage is left empty in three situations:
The prior period was zero or had no data
The change exceeds 500% (a near-zero starting price produces a meaningless percentage)
There was no purchasing activity in days 91–180 back, which is common for recently onboarded suppliers
Why data quality matters here
Spend Lens is only as good as the purchasing data behind it. Three issues account for most confusing results:
Unnamed suppliers. POs without a supplier assigned get grouped together. If a meaningful share of your spend appears under an unknown supplier, assigning those POs will sharpen every concentration figure.
Duplicate supplier records. The same vendor entered three different ways ("Ferguson," "Ferguson Inc," and "FERGUSON ENTERPRISES LLC") splits into three rows. This makes you look less concentrated than you actually are, which understates both your negotiating leverage and your risk. Merging duplicates is one of the highest-value cleanups you can do.
Zero-dollar and blank line items. Lines entered with a $0.00 unit price or no material name distort median price calculations and can push materials into the data-fixes panel.
None of these are problems with Spend Lens, they're catalog and entry issues that Spend Lens surfaces. The good news is that fixing them improves your reporting immediately, on the next nightly refresh.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my numbers change since yesterday? Spend Lens recalculates nightly, and the 12-month window rolls forward each day. Both new activity and the shifting window change your totals.
Why does my export total differ from the dashboard? The export includes all PO statuses, including drafts and canceled orders. Filter the PO Status column to compare like with like.
Why does one material show an enormous price increase? Almost always a unit-of-measure entry issue, the same item priced per box on one line and per piece on another. Check the Data entry fixes panel at the bottom of Material breakdown.
Why do the two "single-source" counts differ? Screen 3 in Demo mode looks at the last 90 days. The Explore card looks at 12 months and requires 3 or more line items. Different windows, different questions.
Who is the unknown supplier in my results? Purchase orders that don't have a supplier assigned. Assigning them will redistribute that spend correctly.
Why is a supplier's trend percentage blank? Either the prior period was zero, the change exceeded 500%, or there was no activity in the 91–180 day range. See the Notes sheet in your export for details.
A PO moved to a different month. Why? Spend is dated at reconciliation. When you reconcile a PO, it lands in the month the cost was finalized.
Can I export the Single-source SKUs or Comparison opportunities lists? The export covers purchase order and supplier data. The material-level analyses in Demo mode are currently available on screen.
Where to go next
Cost Lens (under Jobs) looks at the other side of the equation: what materials cost you when they're consumed on jobs, rather than when you buy them.
Inventory Lens (under Stock) shows what's sitting in your warehouses and trucks between those two moments.
Still have questions?