Maximizing ROI: How SaaS Spend Management Software Can Save Your Business Money

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been a major boon for companies in the digital era offering a range of advantages over on-prem IT operations. It allows you to streamline your workflows, and save massively in terms of time and money besides enabling remote access to your business operations. SaaS helps companies drive innovation underscored by the flexible and scalable characteristic of cloud computing.

With more and more companies leveraging SaaS solutions to power their growth, SaaS has been claiming a significant portion of company budgets and resources. Which has further led to new challenges including overspending. Employees often subscribe to excessive applications, which inflates SaaS usage.

In this article, we will understand the role of SaaS spend management software in optimizing your IT budgets.

What is SaaS Spend Management?

SaaS spend management is a strategy to monitor and track your software subscriptions meticulously so that you can optimize your IT spending. It involves managing the end-to-end SaaS including purchasing, licensing, renewals, and other SaaS-related expenses. It improves your efficiency in managing diverse SaaS solutions, while also maximizing your budget.

For companies to streamline this process, they can utilize SaaS spend management software to gain visibility and incredible insights into software usage and payment trends. Bringing all the information about your SaaS usage into one platform empowers you to identify unnecessary expenditures that you can cut down to save costs.

By adopting SaaS spend management software, you can

• Streamline procurement processes
• Identify and eliminate wasteful spending
• Increase overall savings
• Create a central hub for procurement operations
• Efficiently monitor usage while forecasting costs

By adopting a robust strategy with SaaS spend management software, you can gain complete control of your SaaS utilization through valuable financial insights for data-driven decision-making.

Leveraging SaaS Spend Management Software

Below we discuss how SaaS spend management software can empower businesses by significantly reducing the cost and resources spent to manage SaaS solutions.

Keeping SaaS procurement simple

With SaaS spend management software, you get access to data-driven insights that double up as an expert guide in helping you make the procurement process simple and easy. It helps you secure the best pricing for your current and new cloud software by establishing a SaaS data benchmarking. Solid spend management software like Zaggle can help you streamline the procurement of SaaS tools. Using this information, you can evaluate the available pricing options – Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), fixed-price, user-based, or other models that suit your requirements.

Simplifying SaaS contract management

By streamlining the end-to-end SaaS management using a spend management software like Zaggle, you can create a centralized hub for all the SaaS-related documents. It helps you to pull them up anytime and review them creating transparency that helps your finance team in making an efficient spending strategy. 

Optimizing usage with accurate insights

Using SaaS spend management software, you can derive detailed insights into your SaaS stack achieving efficiency in cost management. Spend management tools like Zaggle spin up analytical insights into your spending habits. The spend management software gives a comprehensive view of all your SaaS subscriptions, employee usage, and spending trends. You can also identify duplicate applications and unused licenses so that you can load off unnecessary software.

Optimize cloud computing usage 

With SaaS spend management platform you can easily track cloud computing costs across departments and platforms for recurring services. The spend management platform streamlines the purchase and management of cloud platforms, while also sharing details of each cloud software license.

Features to Consider in SaaS Spend Management Software

Real-Time Monitoring: Ensure that the software you pick can track, monitor, and manage all your SaaS subscriptions in real-time allowing you to control your spending and avoid wasting your money.

Overspending Police: Get a solution that highlights overspending due to a variety of lapses such as duplicate software, so that you can eliminate redundant subscriptions easily. The features must also include capabilities like monitoring license usage and reallocating users to appropriate packages.

Value for Money: Your SaaS spend management software must not become yet another budget overhead. Instead, its cost must align with the value it offers in managing your overall SaaS spending.

Increased Visibility: The software must provide you complete visibility into your tech stack at an enterprise level including details like licenses, subscription terms, and associated costs so that you can refine your SaaS management strategy.

Best Practices to Follow for Effective Spend Management

• Use SaaS spend management software to conduct a thorough analysis of your spending through regular reviews and analysis data so that you can easily identify trends, track usage patterns, and spot areas where cost optimization is possible.
• Using the centralized dashboard, keep an eye on SaaS subscriptions and licenses to make management, analysis, and cost optimization simple.
• Monitor usage metrics and employee insights to better gauge the value that each SaaS solution is providing. Also, identify redundant subscriptions to make better decisions on renewal or termination.
• Use intelligent insights that these SaaS spend management software provides to see how much you are spending for each SaaS subscription against the industry standards. It will help you negotiate better deals with your vendors.
• Define and implement clear policies and guidelines to help your team with SaaS procurement and their usage across departments. You can enforce compliance policies to avoid overspending or budget overshoots.
• Undertake regular audits of your SaaS stack using the spend management tools to uncover redundancy, overbilling, or overusage/underusage so that you can proactively revoke licenses that are not required.
• Use the SaaS spend management tool’s data analysis capabilities to forecast future spending possibilities, which helps your finance team in budgeting and resource allocation.
• Improve your vendor relationship by tracking their performance, offerings, and benefits, so that you can negotiate better terms, and reallocate the budget to build strong partnerships with high-quality vendors.
• Communicate SaaS spending regulations with your team so that they’re aware of company policies and their role in cost optimization. You can do this by conducting training sessions for your employees.
• Integrate your SaaS spend management software with other tools in your tech stack to enable seamless data harmonization.

Enhance SaaS spend management with Zaggle

In the current competitive market, SaaS is a necessity for businesses to ensure they remain relevant and agile with their customer demands. The SaaS landscape today is riddled with several applications to cater to your every business need. While this makes your operations simple and easy, it also presents a unique challenge. 

With SaaS software available for every other task, it is very easy to get carried away and violate your budget restrictions. This is where a SaaS spend management solution like Zaggle will help. 

Learn more about Zaggle here.