When it comes to managing the company's overall revenue, you consider not only what you sell but also what you save. Spend management is one of the most critical aspects of ensuring positive cash flow.
Robust Spend Management Solutions will help you conserve capital, fund meaningful investments, improve cash flows, and enhance growth. According to G2 Track, the SaaS market is expected to become a $232 billion industry by 2024.
Thanks to technological advancements, you can accurately yet automatically identify ongoing trends, track a business’s SaaS spend, and make data-driven decisions about budget allocation and cost optimization. Yet, the availability of many spend management software solutions makes it hard to shortlist the perfect one.
To make things easier for you, we've created a list of the ten best spend management tools to provide your business with more flexibility regarding cost optimization, budget control, and cash efficiency.
What are SaaS Spend Management Solutions?
Spend management tools are cloud solutions that help organizations manage, track, and streamline overall business spending. They play a vital role in ensuring organizations don’t overspend on products, stay within budget, and generate better ROI.
Most Spend management solutions are capable of helping your business with the following:
- Track software subscription/renewal costs, vendor/supplier costs, employee reimbursements, and SaaS spends across the organization
- Pay close attention to the spending to create a report highlighting the patterns/trends for more improvement
- Implement spending policies, approval workflows, and spending limitations to ensure effective spending
Modern procurement and spend management software like CloudEagle provides more robust features to streamline spend tracking, cost optimization, and procurement, and save time.
Why do you Need Spend Management Solutions?
Improperly managed SaaS applications can affect your business’s growth, especially when you run a large enterprise.
Now that you know what SaaS spend management solutions are, it's time to know why your business needs one.
A high-quality and reliable spending solution will benefit your business if you know your expectations.
More Transparency
With SaaS management software, you can view your business's procurement spending. This will allow accounting teams to organize contracts, track finances, and document the relevant procurement activities.
Finance teams can also track vendor performance, budget, trends, and benchmarking. With more transparency over spending, businesses can determine the areas that need improvements.
Lower Risk
A spend management tool can mitigate procurement risks by controlling the overall procurement process. Apart from saving you time and money, it can provide numerous features to enhance budgetary control, including:
- Centralized purchasing for more effective compliance and visibility
- Expedites the process
- Provide transparency into purchasing decisions.
Greater Accuracy
A spend management solution can enhance the accuracy of accounting data to a great extent. It's because these software solutions can integrate with internal finance systems to provide accurate data on spending, invoices, etc.
When you choose a reputed platform, you can track every purchase, categorize, match, and reconcile them. The software will also reduce the probability of human errors, saving hours of lost productivity.
Best SaaS Spend Management Solutions
As mentioned earlier, multiple spend management solutions are available in the market. Depending on your business's use cases and size, they can cater to different needs.
Let's look at some of the best SaaS spend management tools.
CloudEagle
CloudEagle is one of the best SaaS spend management solutions, focusing on optimizing and managing cloud and SaaS spending. Unlike other platforms and solutions in the market, CloudEagle has comprehensive features to help you optimize your software spend efficiently.
CloudEagle focuses on SaaS cost management, a growing concern for many organizations that rely on cloud services frequently.
You can save up to 30% on your software spend. Planning to get 100% visibility on your SaaS vendors and save more on every SaaS app? CloudEagle is here.
Assisted buyers will help your business start saving SaaS spending from day 1. Furthermore, you will get a 4x return on your investment.
CloudEagle stands apart from the crowd due to its comprehensive SaaS management and procurement features that simplify the complex world of SaaS, making it more manageable and accessible.
The simple interface, coupled with cost optimization, license management, renewal and procurement workflows, shadow IT alerts and assisted buying features, makes CloudEagle a lucrative choice for businesses of all sizes. With CloudEagle, you can know your business's spend in-depth, including individual and departmental-spend data.
For instance, if your portfolio has low-usage or duplicate applications, CloudEagle will help you identify them. On top of that, you can analyze the usage of those applications using CloudEagle and optimize and remove them as per your needs, ultimately saving a significant amount of money for your business.
Rec Room had too many unmanaged SaaS apps, which caused unauthorized purchases and security issues. To gain visibility and control, they used CloudEagle's solution. Integration with SSO and finance tools revealed all apps, including unauthorized ones. CloudEagle helped Rec Room remove redundant apps and manage shadow IT effectively.
Read the detailed success story here.
CloudEagle is a comprehensive SaaS management and procurement solution. Here’s a quick rundown of its features relevant to spend management:
Features
- Identify duplicate, redundant, and free apps (cost optimization)
- License reclamation workflows
- Accurate usage insights
- Renewal workflows to prevent auto-renewals
- Price benchmarking data
- Procurement management
- Shadow IT detection
- Custom spend reports for financial analysis
- Expert negotiation assistance
CloudEagle can help your organization save significantly on costs. Check out this testimonial from Sophie Wang at WeFunder, where she shares how CloudEagle helped her team save on SaaS spending through effective negotiations.
Pricing
Users will get a 15-day free trial. The Starter plan is priced at $1,000/month. You can also choose the Growth plan or the Enterprise plan starting at $2,000/month and $3,000/month respectively. Book a demo today for more information.
Spendesk
All-in-one platform solution Spendesk helps businesses manage individual employee spending. This includes corporate card services, employee spending challenges, spend approval workflows, invoice payments, reimbursements, and compliance features.
You can also manage your SaaS budgets effectively as per the positive and negative cashflow.
Spendesk makes the process of submitting SaaS spending reports easier than ever. You can also track spending automatically through numerous corporate cards and pay the relevant invoices.
The platform offers an application that will help you input new spending data as well as Slack integration to route the channels directly via email.
Features
- SaaS spending management for more transparency
- Recurring billing functionality
- Spend controlling for better financial management
- Automatic invoice management
The interface is simple and easy to navigate, helping employees to upload their spending and route for approvals without any problem.
Pricing
You can open a free account. Spendesk provides three paid plans: Essentials, Scale, and Premium. Book a demo to know more information.
RAMP
RAMP provides an ultimate package of spending management software, focusing on spending management, corporate cards, accounting integrations, and bill payments.
The company states that it can reduce SaaS spend by approximately 3.5%. In addition, they also boast book closures that are ten times faster and more effective than the traditional methods.
Their platform is suitable for numerous businesses across different industries and genres. From startups to large enterprises, RAMP can prove highly beneficial.
Features
- Virtual corporate cards for all employees
- RAMP Bill Pay to automate invoice entry
- Lucrative cash back on partner rewards, purchases, and foreign transactions
- Cloud-based platform
RAMP offers great solutions to businesses facing problems with their spending management. With RAMP, you can track every dollar you spend on business spending.
Pricing
RAMP has a free pricing plan. But you need either RAMP Plus or RAMP Enterprise for the best features. Contact the sales team.
Spendflo
Spendflo is one of the most lucrative SaaS Spend Management Solutions aiming at helping businesses manage their daily SaaS operations. It can streamline contract and approval management while its buyers help your business save 30% of SaaS spending.
It leverages benchmark data and organizational insights within the contract negotiations to achieve such milestones.
With Slack integration and a user-friendly interface, Spendflo will help you monitor your SaaS purchases.
Features
- Spend forecasting and optimization
- Dashboards and visualizations
- SaaS utilization tracking
- Peer benchmarking
Spendflo will consolidate all of your business's SaaS vendors into one unified platform for better visibility and management.
Pricing
Spendflo has two pricing plans. The SaaS Pro starts at $2,500/month and SaaS Growth starts at $7,000/month.
Airbase
Airbase is a widespread procurement or spend management software used by businesses of all sizes. Airbase can help businesses gain superior control over their spending, mitigate financial risks, and close books quickly.
The primary objective of Airbase is to make business SaaS spending more seamless while keeping the essential stakeholders in the loop.
Airbase showcases a range of eye-catching features across spend management, payable automation, and corporate cards for accounting teams, employees, and vendors.
Features
- Integration with the HRIS systems
- Dynamic algorithms for incorporating approved vendors to make future transactions seamless
- Rules that reflect the core policies of a company
- Seamless integration with other organization systems
The outstanding reimbursement module makes managing employee spending quick and efficient. Reliable customer support is there for quick assistance.
Pricing
Airbase has three pricing plans: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. Talk to the sales team for more information.
Coupa
Coupa is a cloud platform that helps businesses boost visibility as well as control over their supply chains and spending limits. Coupa is perfect for medium and large businesses across different industries.
Their cloud-based platform covers payment, procurement, and supply chain management, helping businesses manage their transactions efficiently.
Coupa leverages the benefits of anonymized customer information to provide data-driven insights for boosting business transactions.
Features
- Vendor research to discover new vendors
- Automated A/P solutions for invoices and spending
- ERP systems integration
- Vendor management
Coupa has great compatibility and versatility with numerous applications. If you're looking for Spend Management Solutions to streamline spend management, choose Coupa today.
Pricing
Coupa has a free pricing plan and two paid plans. The verified plan starts at $594/year and the Premium Support plan starts at $499/month.
Zluri
Zluri helps IT teams remove duplicate applications, identify underused apps, and provide insights on application renewals based on usage data. Zluri comes into the picture when you need optimal control and visibility over SaaS platforms.
Zluri can also track the cost and usage of applications within your SaaS ecosystem. You can learn more about your SaaS environment and provide solutions for efficient SaaS applications.
Not to mention, Zluri can also optimize your business's spending in the process.
Features
- Insights on department-wise spending
- Risk and compliance management
- Automated recommendations for better infrastructure
- SaaS usage insights
The SaaS discovery by Zluri plays an integral role in SaaS spending management by enhancing visibility into the entire range of applications.
Zluri provides a one-time demo. You need to contact the sales team for customized pricing.
Mesh Payments
Another popular all-in-one Spend management software capable of creating superior visibility and control in every transaction is Mesh Payments.
By automating the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, Mesh Payments can help finance users streamline payments for suppliers, travel, tail spend, vendor payments, and many more.
Mesh Payments also create spending categories and come with great invoice reconciliation features. The system provides physical and virtual cards with pre-approved spending limits.
This allows employees to spend on their self-service while sending the SaaS spend information back to the cloud-based server.
Features
- Currency conversions with credit card integrations
- Ease of developing spending reports
- Digital receipt management
- Automated reminders
While Mesh Payments is perfect for medium businesses and large enterprises, you can also use it for your startup. However, the affordability could have been better.
Pricing
Contact the sales team for a customized quote.
Finly
Finly is a financial technology platform that helps organizations manage corporate spending. Thanks to its user-friendly platform, it can streamline reimbursement, spend tracking, and reporting processes.
With eye-catching features like intelligent categorization and receipt scanning, Finly will simplify spending management for enterprises of all industries.
Finly helps businesses improve spend control and make informed financial decisions by offering great visibility into customizable approval workflows and spending.
Features
- Approval process control
- Time and SaaS spend tracking
- Workflow management and invoice management
- Data imports and data exports
Finly is highly configurable, with measures and checks in place. It also offers a vendor payment facility for more effectiveness.
Pricing
Finly has three pricing plans. Contact their sales executives for more information.
Snow
If you want to help your IT team boost their productivity and workflow, choosing one of the most popular SaaS Management Solutions, like Snow software, is a great addition.
To ensure the growing list of applications doesn't affect the positive cash flow of your business, you need to implement Snow's spending management tool.
In addition to that, SAM professionals can use Snow to mitigate SaaS sprawl, unexpected bills, and security issues from unknown SaaS usage.
Features
- Complete visibility of business's software assets
- Manage software renewals
- All information, such as contract details, vendor details, and payment records, in one place
- Ensure software license compliance
Snow brings cloud management, software asset management, and SaaS management in one place, helping you to optimize your technology in one platform.
Pricing
You have to contact the team for more pricing information.
Conclusion
Spend Management Solutions can make the purchasing and SaaS spend tracking process simpler and more efficient. It doesn't matter which tool you choose; they offer numerous features.
Depending on your chosen tools and your business's end goals, you can take relevant steps and achieve positive cash flow.
While Finly, Zluri, Ramp, etc may prove good choices, what you need is comprehensive software with an entire spend lifecycle to manage the cash flow effectively.
In that case, the only software that encompasses all essential features for effective SaaS spend management is CloudEagle.
CloudEagle can help you optimize your spending, streamline SaaS procurement, provide negotiation assistance and right-size licenses, and guarantee 30% savings that other vendors don't.
If your business's objective is to streamline the entire SaaS cycle, from cost optimization to procurement workflow, and manage business spending, don’t forget to contact CloudEagle.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a spend management software?
A spend management software streamlines the complete procurement journey, starting from the initiation of a purchase request to the issuance of a purchase order to the supplier. A comprehensive solution for managing spends enables effective cost control for management.
2. What is spend optimization?
Spend optimization is the process of addressing inefficiencies from outdated processes. Whether optimizing a single category, two, or all spend categories within your company, this approach will contribute to both time and cost savings.
3. What is cloud spend management?
Cloud spend management is about keeping track of, reporting, and planning for the costs of using cloud services. The main goal is to understand, control, and cut down spends related to public cloud resources to get the best value.