How much does it cost you?
The difficult part: What types of Cost do I have?
We need to establish a Mutually Exclusive and Exhaustive cost hierarchy
(It should be able to describe 100% of your costs without duplication)
Creating an exhaustive hierarchy like this will take work, but it IS possible.
Implementation
Unfortunately, there will almost definitely have to be manual steps in this process. Costs like performance marketing are easy to automate and aggregate, spend on things like events, operations cost, and SaaS tools are not.
If you want a cost number that you trust, you will have to bring in all of its component parts. Often this work is done in spreadsheets - that’s OK! Just don’t let that be the only place this data lives. We then need to get that data into the Data Warehouse - into a table with the following schema.
| date | level_1 | level_2 | level_3 | amount | end_date |
Example:
| date | level_1 | level_2 | level_3 | amount | end_date |
| 2024-03-01 | GROWTH | SAAS | HUBSPOT | 1200 | 2025-02-28 |
| 2024-03-01 | OPERATIONS | SALARY | SALES | 20000 | 2024-03-31 |
| 2024-03-01 | GROWTH | PERFORMANCE_MARKETING | TIKTOK | 455 | NULL |
| 2024-03-02 | GROWTH | PERFORMANCE_MARKETING | TIKTOK | 525 | NULL |
| 2024-03-15 | GROWTH | EVENTS | NULL | 8850 | NULL |
Not all spend is at the same granularity.
- In this example, the company paid for a Hubspot subscription that renews in 12 months. Establishing an end_date will allow us to easily distribute this cost across the active period