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No longer reserved for organizations at scale, SaaS is more accessible than ever before.
Nowadays, the average company uses 134 different software applications to cater to their every business need, spanning sales and marketing to finance and operations. Whether your priority is to accelerate speed to market or streamline project collaboration, a comprehensive SaaS portfolio offers innumerable benefits.
However, with a rapidly proliferated suite of applications comes new challenges — and chief among them is the issue of effective SaaS management.
Without years of experience in software procurement and record keeping, many small and mid-sized businesses find themselves encumbered by countless spreadsheets and restrictive manual processes. While these methods aim to keep on top of important contract details like billing dates, renewal schedules and compliance details, inefficient management may lead to missed opportunities for cost savings.
So, what’s the solution?
Here, we’ll address the inefficiencies of legacy SaaS management and the benefits of using automated SaaS procurement software to transform your processes.
The problem with legacy SaaS management
The ‘traditional’ SaaS management of yesteryear demands company procurement managers to manually insert extensive contract details into a spreadsheet or set of files used to track the company’s software subscriptions.
We see that many small to medium-sized businesses still operate this outdated approach to managing their portfolio. The problem is, this approach is entirely unsustainable — our data shows that the number of tools in use at organizations increases by 7% year-on-year, so even if you’re not deploying a broad set of tools at your current stage of growth, you might not be far off.
As your company scales, the once small number of SaaS subscriptions can quickly spiral to unmanageable levels, with the process becoming all the more convoluted when you factor in the complex set of conditions bound to each contract in your stack.
So, what do you have to look out for when implementing legacy SaaS management?
Below, we’ve listed some of the key barriers to productivity and cost savings.
Auto-renewals are missed
Auto-renewing clauses are commonplace within SaaS — our data shows that they appear in up to 89% of software contracts. While these might seem convenient at first, their purported time-saving benefits for you as a buyer could actually cause problems for your SaaS management.
This is due to the ever-changing nature of business needs. As your company scales its operations, you may outgrow the systems that you use for a variety of functions and look to procure solutions from an alternative provider, or scale back any instances of licensing surplus to requirement.
But when using spreadsheets as a way of managing SaaS tools, it becomes all too easy to lose oversight of subscription dates and rates of usage among the workforce. As a result, you may find yourself locked into a contract providing little business value, having voided the opportunity to terminate or renegotiate until your next renewal window.
Price uplifts go unchecked
Software vendors are known for frequently adjusting their product pricing — and these changes can catch you off guard if you’re not vigilant in tracking any new price points or charges introduced.
In fact, many providers have price uplift clauses built into their contracts, allowing them to increase your fee year-on-year. These are vital to keep on top of when dealing with multiple subscriptions spread across various branches of the organization.
Without a centralized system to monitor any adjustments to your contract pricing or terms, you risk losing track of rising costs and overspending on the most business-critical contracts. As a result, this lack of visibility may reduce your leverage to negotiate on pricing or undermine budgeting when higher recurring costs go unaccounted for.
Manual data entry is prone to error
No matter how sharp your eye for detail, manual data entry and spreadsheet-based software tracking are inherently prone to error. Even small mistakes in handling data can result in inaccurate records, missed subscription renewals, or major compliance issues. As your organization scales and accumulates more SaaS applications, the likelihood of costly errors rises – and maintaining a clear, centralized view of your software portfolio becomes increasingly difficult.
A manual approach to managing software doesn’t just create risk, it drives up costs – especially during periods of rapid growth. This is precisely when finance leaders need to control spending and preserve margins. Without a streamlined system in place, inefficient SaaS management can lead to budget unpredictability, reduced operational efficiency, and poor decision-making based on incomplete or outdated information.
So how do you prevent this domino effect?
The answer lies in implementing efficient SaaS management processes.
What is automated SaaS management?
Automated SaaS management refers to the use of dedicated software designed to centralize, organize, and streamline a company’s SaaS subscriptions. Specialized SaaS purchasing platforms offer features like usage analytics and renewal alerts.
These platforms also support robust SaaS contract management – helping to standardize the way contracts are stored, tracked, and actioned across teams.
Benefits of automated SaaS management
Embracing a new approach to SaaS management can revolutionize your procurement and budgeting processes, and offer access to significant cost-saving opportunities.
Here are some of the benefits that could transform how your business approaches SaaS.
1. Cost savings
While spreadsheets may seem like a cost-effective solution at first, they quickly become inefficient and costly as your company grows. The time and manual effort required to build, update, and manage comprehensive SaaS tracking sheets can soon outweigh any perceived savings. In contrast, automated SaaS management enables you to control costs and reduce burn rate – especially during critical growth phases.
By tracking software usage in real time, you can quickly identify cost-saving opportunities, including by canceling unused tools or downsizing underutilized subscriptions – a critical step if you're looking at reducing the cost of your revenue stack. This visibility allows you to eliminate redundancies and consolidate overlapping tools, delivering immediate and measurable savings.
A dedicated SaaS management platform also streamlines software procurement.
Centralizing purchasing processes allows your team to negotiate better deals, benefit from bulk discounts, and avoid fragmented buying decisions. It not only reduces manual workload and administrative overhead, but also ensures all software purchases are aligned with policy – helping to eliminate maverick spend in SaaS, boost efficiency, minimize waste, and protect your margins as you scale.
2. Improved data organization
Automated SaaS management platforms provide a single source of truth for all subscription data. Typically, this information is vast and wide-reaching — encompassing contract details such as:
- Subscription cost — fee, discounting, additional charges
- Tool utilization — user personas, adoption rate, sentiment
- Contract terms — length, renewal schedule, number of seats, additional clauses
- Billing details — schedule, payment method
- Vendor contract — associated supplier, primary contact
- Governance — application owner, security and compliance details
- Application functions — features offered, overlap with other tools
Thankfully, automated management tools can pull this data with minimal human intervention, reducing the likelihood of data entry mistakes or version control issues. Various studies have reported that up to 70% of spreadsheets contain errors — which, again, can lead to inaccurate documentation with costly knock-on effects..
For example, poorly organized data could result in a contract that is no longer in use by anybody within the organization being renewed for another year, incurring unnecessary costs with no positive outcome for the business. With an automated system, however, data is easily accessible and constantly updated.,
3. Enables strategic decision making
Gaining insights into your SaaS usage and spending patterns is crucial for making informed decisions. Automated management platforms offer SaaS discovery methods that can help you identify, track, and optimize the full breadth of SaaS tools in your portfolio. Tools like SSO discovery, for instance, can monitor software usage metrics like device and access times for the apps in your stack, informing user behavior.
Combined with procurement analytics software capabilities, these insights help you identify underutilized subscriptions, optimize license allocation, and ensure that you're getting the most value out of your SaaS investments — producing actionable insights that wouldn’t be possible using traditional approaches to software management.
How Vertice can support your SaaS management
Manual tracking is no longer sufficient.
Vertice’s automated SaaS management platform provides unrivaled visibility into your entire software portfolio — and every contract detail that will help you to make better financial decisions.
From one convenient dashboard, you can receive timely alerts for when your contracts are up for renewal, track utilization rates across each tool, and identify invaluable cost-saving opportunities.
And it's not just the platform we provide.
Our team of procurement experts will also work with your team to negotiate software contracts on your behalf, saving you time and freeing you up to focus on strategic business operations. Why not see for yourself how Vertice was able to help one company, Holidu, save as much as $155,000 on a single contract, while helping them achieve average savings of 32% across their entire tech stack.
