Our company is using an ever-growing number of subscription based Saas tools in finance, marketing, engineering, sales, HR. We're trying to manage who, what, how many by using spreadsheets. But is hard to keep the info straight. I'm pretty sure I'm paying for seats we're not using, but its hard to track everyone's usage and comings and goings? What are folks using to track their Saas subscriptions? Thoughts on best practice?
How best to manage the multitude of SaaS subscriptions across the company?
Answers
Tom, We had this problem as well and went looking for a solution after it had already become a problem. It was quite manageable until we reached about 70-80 employees (we're ~160 now), at which point the spreadsheet we used just did not scale.
We began using a service called SubCentral (www.subcentral.io), which focuses on managing both costs and access of SaaS tools (Salesforce, Expensify, Intacct, Slack, etc.). We've been quite happy with it.
The tool is designed specifically for managing recurring subscriptions (billing dates, renewal dates, etc.), which is unlike anything I've come across in the market. You can on and off-board employees from the subscriptions, configure and distribute a cloud software purchasing policy to employees (which happens to come with one that we modified to fit our company), and forward important documents and emails into the tool as a central inbox. It provides department allocations based on user associations, too, so we were able to replace our department allocation spreadsheet and adopt it as part of our month-end closing process.
They even integrate with our bank (SVB, but seems as though they have hundreds if not thousands) to show trends of actual expense and cash flow for my departments, SaaS vendors, and even at the employee level. We went looking for something that could help with access but ultimately found something that manages costs too, which turned out to be just as important - it helped us save a few thousand dollars by getting ahead of auto renewals we didn't want.
I recommend checking them out.
Randy
Thanks. I took a look at SubCentral. Great features. I especially like the employee off-boarding feature. Saved us a lot of time when an employee decides to leave. Not to mention not wasting money on orphaned subscriptions...