How can I document and track cost-saving processes effectively using Confluence?

[Olivia Carter]

I want to use Confluence to document and manage internal processes related to cost saving and efficiency. For example, tracking recurring expenses, documenting optimization steps, and maintaining simple guides for teams to follow best practices.
I’m looking for suggestions on how others structure pages or spaces for this purpose. Do you use templates, labels, or page hierarchies to keep everything organized and easy to update over time?
Any practical tips or real use cases would be helpful.

[Kris Klima _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Olivia Carter and welcome to the Community.

There are many ways how to slice this cake - in terms of documentation structure and strategy - all of which depend on specific circumstances. What happens before and after documenting a specific area. How often do you update specific documents. Is the primary target audience your accounting department or people who file expenses? Or both - in which case you'd probably need two doc sets.

For example - you can have a specific space to handle ALL documentation around a specific topic:

So you create a Space called Track Recuring Expenses in ABC. This space would have all topics pertaining to tracking expenses in ABC. And you'd do it for KLM, XYZ, etc. I can imagine that you want to have expenses documents in one space.

• best practices
• expense reports
• processes

Or... you can turn it around and have a space for Best Practices, a space for expense, a space of optimization guide. Or, to return to the audience question... a space for your accountants and a space for everybody else.

Ask yourself what constitutes a self-contained chunk of content - from the user's point of view. Mind, a user might be the person who files the expenses claim but it can be the person who needs to process and/or manage these.

You want to minimize the need to jump from space to space to accomplish a task/process. Links between pages are easier to maintain within a single space. 

As for reviews and ensuring it's all up-to-date... The best practice is to have a dedicated person, or persons, assigned to update a specific space/section. The idea is - update immediately as the change is effected. You can also decide to enforce a review of every page that hasn't been updated in, say, 3 months.

You should definitely use templates to ensure uniformity / consistency in specific areas (such as expenses) and ensure that any change is proliferated automatically.

Labels will help you to keep your content organized - not necessarily in everyday use but they will improve search, analysis and maintenance. You can use Content Manager in Confluence, or an app (some are free) to quickly organize and filter content by labels, etc. 

Page hierarchies would be great to organize expenses by date (Year, Month) or Department (Year, Month). Again, the details would be dictated by your overal strategy. 

Things to explore:

• Confluence Databases, this is a littel gem for all sorts of relational data and details in your content. You can find some use-cases and how-tos here
• Jira - Jira is to track processes, to leave breadcrumbs, Confluence to document the result of those processes.

Imagine this:

• A ticket (work item) in a Jira space (project) - open, process (approval), close.
• an actual expense document in Confluence, nicely filed, and slotted where it needs to be.
• A database entry User - Jira ticket - link to a Confluence page. Sortable by users, by date, by department....
• A series of Confluence spaces - however you organize them.

(You can find a more comprehensive collection of ideas and questions to ask about documentation strategy and life cycle in our 6-part Documentation Guide)

[Olivia Carter]

This is a really helpful breakdown. One thing I’ve seen work well is adding a simple review cycle to cost-saving pages (for example, quarterly reviews) so outdated processes don’t stay documented too long.
Also, combining labels with a clear page owner helps a lot—someone is always accountable for keeping expense and savings data accurate over time. Thanks for sharing the practical structure ideas.

[Laura Campbell]

I would add to @Kris Klima _K15t_ 's response by suggesting Loom, which is really great for creating a library of how-to videos for internal processes. There's even an integration where you record something and Loom can automatically generate the Confluence page with the process.

I find the Loom library experience a bit chaotic, so I would recommend embedding each important video on a Confluence page.

My team has probably 50 or more process pages, and since it was getting hard to remember "do we have a process for XYZ?" I created a little Rovo agent that looks at just our process pages (you can restrict the knowledge), and answers the user if we have some kind of guide or playbook for the topic they need.