It is cool to make business subscriptions accessible to everyone, it means that every employee can read his favorite online magazine use software of his preference, join collaboration tools to increase productivity etc. And increasingly it means that your team’s software needs are met with a minimum cost and maintenance.
More and more employees are using extremely wide range of software for work, it can be a communication tool, text editor, video editor or a software development tool. It’s so easy to subscribe for most SaaS tools (Software as a Service) that what people use can change regularly. It is empowering employees and boosting productivity but for financial teams, it can be a lot less fun.
When subscriptions spent is spread across countless individuals, it’s becoming challenging to maintain oversight of where company money is going.
Who’s signed up for which tool and how much of the company’s money is spent exactly per month is difficult to monitor. 71% of companies have at least one SaaS subscription with no billing owner, according to a study. (link: https://www.blissfully.com/saas-trends/2019-annual/)
How much do you pay for business subscriptions?
In traditional workplaces, the IT department has full ownership over new software that’s introduced. This centralised approach means that adopting a new tool can go through the long process of validation, approval, introduction and most likely will be long, tedious and not-at-all transparent.
In more modern companies, people are embracing SaaS subscriptions.
New research shows that — across companies of all sizes — business spending on subscription services will continue to grow.
Earlier this year, figures suggested a 24.6% growth in enterprise SaaS spending in the EU, comparatively with 2011 market growth reached striking 350% accordingly to the study.
(link: https://medium.com/@FIXER.Inc/european-cloud-market-the-hidden-opportunity-6368b5433fbb)
As of 2018, the average spend on subscription services per company is $343,000 (around €274,000) in the US. That makes it around $2,900 (€2611) per employee, per year, spent on SaaS itself. Depending on the job they do, employees might be using more than 200 different SaaS tools to work effectively. For remotely working employees it is likely to see this increase even further.
With new business subscriptions being adopted on a daily basis, company spending might easily go out of control.
So far we have been talking only about subscription that are maintained, but what about those who are owned by someone who left the company already, or bought and paid with someones corporate card and been forgotten about? How many times have you have found out that a former employee’s name still registered as the owner of a subscription? Those subscriptions are being paid by someone – but who? How much is it costing the company monthly?
Furthermore, if your SaaS spending is out of control, your enterprise valuation (EBITDA) will be affected. An uncontrolled SaaS spend that’s increasing your operating costs will impact how potential buyers see your business.
So there is a pressure on financial managers and CFOs to manage these costs and control their growth in the right way.An answer? Automated company spending.
Enterprise expense management solutions such as Haslle allow you to automate, manage and control SaaS subscriptions and recurring company’s spendings.
We unify your entire expense process, making the whole thing automated, more transparent and controllable.
Here’s how switching to an automated solution can help save your business money on subscriptions
SaaS management through payment cards for employees
The primary benefit that an automated expensing solution provides for business subscription management is virtual corporate company cards issued to every subscription employee. These cards can be pre-loaded and set with dynamically changeable through easy request-approve process custom spending limits before being given to your employees. That gives you full control and transparency of who is signing up to which subscriptions and how much does it cost.
This empowers your staff to make purchases without ever needing to ask for reimbursement. It also allows your financial team always stay in control of your business spending. And in case if someone leaves the organisation, your finance team will be able to reallocate or disable their payments.
Financial overview in the realtime
The wasted spend on “forgotten” or “no-ones” subscriptions can be eliminated with more real-time monitoring of business spend, one of the key features of Haslle.
This will make it much easier for you to forecast your company’s spendings and make strategic decisions on how to spend your company’s money on SaaS.
Invoice managing and account integrations
Everyone who submitted expense report at least once knows how painful and time-consuming it can be to match invoices to card payments: endless receipts, calculations, and at the end – hours of time spent. With an automated solution such as Haslle, categorisation and spend matching happens automatically as your employees pay. Everything is then connected seamlessly and integrated with accounting software – so no more repetitive manual reconciliation for financial managers.
Software is eating the world and SaaS subscriptions are changing the way businesses run so it is the right time to change the way you pay for them.
Haslle Team.
