The Centralized Approach
It takes an army of software products to successfully run a modern company. It’s easy to get caught in this complex web of products, which leads to unnecessary expenses, disorganization, and confusion. The best strategy to avoid these issues is to take a centralized approach to the recurring costs of the SaaS tools your company uses, recognizing that every subscription used by every employee is part of the same broader system, and should be organized as such.
One primary aspect of this centralized approach is the concept of consolidating existing subscriptions. It’s quite common for businesses to underestimate the number of subscriptions they’re actually paying for; with multiple employees working on completely different projects or duties, there are often unnoticed duplicate subscriptions that two or more different people or teams are subscribed to. Consolidating these duplicate subscriptions under a company or multi-user plan (most SaaS vendors offer these types of plans) would lower costs while not taking away any existing access.
Facing Unwanted SaaS Expenses
Beyond consolidating duplicate subscriptions, it’s also important to avoid wasting money on subscriptions that are no longer being utilized. These can arise when employees with ongoing subscriptions leave the company. The subscription charges continue without management noticing the stray cost and updating their system. But unused subscriptions can also come from employees who receive approval to try out a new product, find they don’t need it, and forget to notify their boss. It’s a completely reasonable move- their focus should be on doing their job, not wrangling countless SaaS expenses- but it does lead to mounting, indefinitely scheduled expenses. So a big part of the company’s overall strategy should involve identifying unused but ongoing SaaS subscriptions, canceling them ASAP, and preventing further transactions from taking place.
But canceling SaaS subscriptions is often far more difficult than purchasing them, and this is where it’s essential to stick to best practices to terminate the recurring cost as efficiently and quickly as possible. It’s useful to be fast and assertive in tackling unwanted subscription costs that don’t allow cancellation at the click of a button. But once you find yourself or your employees wasting time on phone calls or frustratingly slow correspondence with the vendor, there’s a problem. Don’t discount the idea of simply canceling the company cards attached to these stubborn recurring charges, but try to establish a better system that reduces the burden on you to end things. This entails using payment methods that are specific to your subscriptions and that you can easily cut off, like virtual credit cards; that way, vendors’ complicated cancellation processes can be completely bypassed and the payment ‘on-off switch’ is all yours.
It also pays to keep an eye out for metered plans and ‘free trials’ that hit the company’s balance sheet with stealthy new charges. Track and limit these types of plans as much as possible.
A centralized system of managing your company’s SaaS expenses and following these best practices can take many forms, but you may need more than just an easily outdated spreadsheet. One tool you can use to keep track and limit SaaS costs is NachoNacho, which consolidates all subscriptions in one place and allows you to put charge limits on each individual software product. NachoNacho’s system of virtual cards also enables one-click cancellation, eliminating the need to waste any time chasing down vendors and jumping through hoops to end a subscription. In a business environment that’s only generating more and more SaaS demands, it may be an excellent investment for your business to cut down costs, streamline your operations, and stay on top of the many tools you use to grow your business.
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