Tips

Why It's More Important Than Ever to Have a Clear Understanding of Your Subscription Spend

Taliman automates auditing and tracking of all your software subscriptions for free. Securely connect to your company's bank to reveal everything about your software spending — including overcharges, renewals and trials.

Anthony Garza
June 8, 2023
5min
Why It's More Important Than Ever to Have a Clear Understanding of Your Subscription Spend

The world is definitely experiencing a SaaS boom with the SaaS market becoming a $300 billion industry. According to Gartner Market Guide, SaaS spending among companies in different industries continues to grow by 15-20% every year. Organizations they have studied use more than 125 different SaaS apps, and SaaS spending averages at $1,040 per employee annually.

The world’s SaaS use is ever-increasing, but companies usually don’t have the bandwidth to monitor, assess, and optimize their SaaS subscriptions to maximize efficiency. Having a clear understanding of your subscription spend is becoming more important than ever.

Let’s enumerate all the reasons why it’s important to have a full understanding and visibility of your company’s SaaS spending.

1. Avoid paying for tools you don’t use

A lot of companies are paying for software tools they no longer use. There are lots of forgotten license cancellations or underutilized tools. Employees get busy with their main tasks and responsibilities that it’s easy to overlook the fine details which could turn out to be a huge budget waste.

For example, after using our subscription management tool Talisman, One Seven Tech didn’t expect they could save as much as $14,000 from unused or underutilized licenses they had to cancel. Like them, you can also use an automated SaaS auditing tool like Talisman, instead of manually tracing every subscription detail. The sooner you do it, the sooner you can stop wasting SaaS budget on tools that are just sitting idle for months or even years now.

2. Avoid Redundancy

There are also a lot of cases of duplicate apps among companies. They’re subscribed to two or more apps that essentially have the same function. Even if your company has the money to burn, wasting SaaS budget is still not the best way to operate as a business. Overlapping tools are not only wasting your budget, but they can also lead to confusion among your employees. Cohesion and standardization are important to make all business processes smooth sailing, and having multiple tools with the same function may just cause more chaos than productivity.

The more you optimize everything about your business, the more you can supercharge your success and avoid unwanted inefficiencies.

3. Avoid SaaS sprawl

SaaS sprawl happens when the number of software subscriptions your company has becomes too large and unmanageable. We understand that acquiring more tools can be necessary as you scale and grow, but unnecessary SaaS bloat can also pose certain problems like security issues, productivity loss, and wasted spending.

To avoid SaaS sprawl, you need to establish a SaaS procurement and management process that works for your business. The key is to centralize everything and allow the IT team to administrate the whole SaaS management process. This can be more efficiently done with a SaaS subscription management tool like Talisman. Using Talisman, you can provision and de-provision users easily and have a full dashboard and overview of all the subscriptions under your company as well as their costs, users, and level of utility. This way, you can reduce the manual process of organizing and optimizing your SaaS spending and get a bird’s eye view of your entire tech stack.

4. Better meet your business goals

If you have a clear understanding of your SaaS expenses, you can better evaluate whether or not they’re actually aligned with your relevant business goals. Perhaps there are certain changes to the workflow or organizational goals and the tools that you heavily used the past year are no longer as useful. Perhaps you need to focus your spending more on sales and no longer need to invest a lot in corporate communications.

You can make better decisions if you have full visibility of your SaaS subscriptions. You can cancel subscriptions that are no longer serving you well, and route the freed-up budget to other parts of the business that require more funding and support. For example, one of our clients OneSeven Tech, used their freed-up budget to make their first sales hire. Getting access to valuable insights from a subscription management tool can help you direct your company in the right direction.

5. Increase your company’s runway

Avoiding wasted spending is one of the best ways to take care of your company’s runway. SaaS subscription management can be a crucial component for proper cash flow management. Expense control is important to ensure operational continuity and financial stability.

Ready to maximize the optimize your subscription management? Sign up on Talisman and enjoy real-time expense tracking!