Spend
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      Understanding Spend Insights in Almanac

      Use Spend data to benchmark market activity and make smarter inventory and location decisions

      Note: Spend Insights is a premium feature available to Almanac subscribers with access to comparison-based analytics.

      Overview

      Spend Insights helps you evaluate market-level sales and transaction activity around your stores. Powered by Mastercard data, it offers a reliable benchmark against which to measure store performance — helping you answer, “Is my store doing well, or is the market just soft?”

      Spend shows how customers are spending — not just where they’re visiting — to support smarter decisions about stocking, staffing, and strategy.


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      How Spend Insights Works

      Spend Insights is built on a privacy-compliant dataset from Mastercard, covering:

      • 210M cards
      • 12M merchants
      • Updated weekly with 1–3 week lag

      It uses quads (local 1-mile square geographies) to reflect average sales and transactions over the past 90 days. Rather than exact dollar values, Spend displays an index showing relative performance.


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      Using Spend in the Platform

      1. Open the dashboard view for any store.
      2. Click Comparison and choose Market Spend.
      3. Pick a metric: Sales or Transactions.
      4. Filter by category (e.g., Total Apparel, Total Retail).

      Spend data appears as columns next to your store data. You can scroll, hover for definitions, or display line charts to view trends over time.

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      Interpreting the Spend Index

      The Spend Index is a relative score that compares current local activity to a fixed national baseline:

      • An index of 100 reflects the national average from 2018 for that specific category.
      • An index of 150 means 50% higher than that 2018 baseline.
      • An index of 80 means 20% lower than the 2018 baseline.
      Caution:
      • Do not compare index values across different categories. Each index is industry-specific, and the baseline varies by sector (e.g., apparel vs. restaurants).
      • The index is best used for trending over time within the same metric and category, or for comparing different locations in the same category.


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      Use Cases for Spend

      Optimize Inventory

      • Shift stock based on real-time market demand
      • React faster to early signals of changing behavior

      Evaluate Leases

      • Identify stores that are underperforming relative to their market
      • Support renewal, renegotiation, or closure decisions

      Contextualize Store Performance

      • Explain dips or surges in store traffic with market-level context
      • Show leadership whether issues are internal or external

      Spend __ Store Visits - Sales

      Tips for Effective Use

      • Use Total Apparel or Total Retail for better coverage at local levels
      • Hover over column headers for metric definitions
      • Use line charts to correlate Spend with foot traffic or transactions
      • Export data for presentations or deeper analysis

      Dashboard - Table - Tooltip