Why you need SaaS purchasing software

Save time and money when buying, managing and renewing SaaS

Aimee Manning | DEC 14, 2022

5 min read

In the face of so much economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever that you have a clear understanding of how much is being spent — and on what. While this applies to all business expenditure, one particular area of focus should be on SaaS spending.

Having fast become one of the largest outgoings in any modern organization, software plays a fundamental role in helping businesses scale. But with soaring SaaS pricing inflation, coupled with increased maverick spending, these software applications can also be responsible for companies hemorrhaging huge amounts of money and wasting a substantial amount of time.

This doesn’t have to be the case though. At least not when you have a centralized approach to SaaS purchasing, total control of your SaaS stack and the leverage to secure the best possible deal on any contract — something that’s made possible with SaaS purchasing software.

In this guide, we’ll look at the benefits of such software and the cost of not using it — both in terms of time and money.

The importance of using a SaaS purchasing solution

There’s no denying that SaaS has done wonders for many modern organizations, but while these applications can be your competitive advantage, when they go unmanaged they can also become your Achilles’ heel.

The problem is, they’re going unmanaged a lot.

According to research, 80% of employees have admitted to using SaaS applications at work without getting approval from IT — something that is undoubtedly contributing to the rise in duplicate software applications, security and compliance issues, and wasted SaaS spend.

But with maverick spending and shadow IT on the rise, organizations are losing both oversight and control of their SaaS stack. And this loss of control is costing them time and money.

The benefits of SaaS purchasing software

So, what are the benefits?

Gain total visibility of your SaaS stack

Software applications are becoming more and more ingrained into business operations, but as your SaaS stack grows, the need for visibility and control becomes all the more crucial.

Without it, you open the door to spiraling SaaS spend, security risks, compliance issues and a whole host of other challenges.

SaaS purchasing software prevents this by giving you a consolidated view of:

Which applications are being subscribed to at any given time
How much each application is costing the business
How many licenses and seats are being paid for — and how much each one costs
Who the application owner is
What the purpose of the SaaS app is
Whether or not the subscription will auto-renew and if so, when and how much for

Sure, you can manually track this information in a spreadsheet, but as your company grows and you utilize more tools, it becomes exponentially harder to keep on top of this and ensure that your SaaS stack remains cost effective.

Fortunately, SaaS purchasing software gives you a real-time view of your software portfolio. In fact, it holds the key to many cost-saving opportunities, for example the opportunities to right-size your SaaS stack in response to the needs of your business.

This includes identifying and rectifying:

Duplicate SaaS applications
Redundant SaaS applications
Unused licenses

Benefit from significant cost savings

In addition to finding opportunities to rectify wasted and unnecessary spending on SaaS applications, there are additional ways you can reduce your software spend.

According to research from Vertice, 90% of buyers are overpaying for their software by an average of 20-30% — something that is largely driven by the lack of pricing transparency in the market. In other words, as a buyer, you often have no frame of reference on pricing and therefore no leverage to get the best price — or contract terms.

But what if you did?

With the right SaaS purchasing platform, you are guaranteed to get the best possible deal on any contract. Take Vertice, for example. With access to the pricing benchmarks and transactions for more than 13,000 SaaS vendors worldwide, Vertice can offer significant savings when it comes to purchasing or renewing your software.

Better still, our team of expert negotiators can handle these negotiations on your behalf, leveraging not only our pricing insights, but also years of expertise and vendor relationships to secure you the best terms on any contract.

Gain back valuable time

In addition to saving you money, SaaS purchasing software can also save you valuable time.

How?

By taking the burden of buying, managing and renewing SaaS off your hands, freeing you up to focus on your core business operations.

In fact, by handling the entire procurement process, from negotiating to closing deals, a platform such as Vertice can also save you the endless back and forth between multiple different vendors and stakeholders. You maintain full visibility at all stages, while we do the heavy lifting — only requiring your input for approvals and signoffs.

Streamline your SaaS purchasing with zero risk

With SaaS inflation on the rise, less pricing transparency than ever before, and increased maverick spending, it’s never been more important to centralize your SaaS purchasing and benefit from the buying power of experienced negotiators.

But while the benefits we’ve outlined above speak for themselves — enhanced visibility and significant time and cost-savings — what we haven’t yet mentioned is how Vertice is entirely risk free.

In other words, how we guarantee you annual cost savings.

Find out more here, or see for yourself how much we could save you by using our free cost savings analysis tool.