How Does CloudEagle Help Finance Teams Manage SaaS Spend?

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We’re noticing a sudden surge of attention surrounding SaaS spend management software in 2023.

It looks like businesses and their finance teams realized that their spreadsheets weren't sufficient to manage their SaaS spending and are looking to migrate to automation.

Why now? Do they fear the recession might impact their business?

Only businesses that overspent on SaaS applications and lacked a spending management strategy should be bothered by the recession.

Nevertheless, even if you’ve overspent, you can easily migrate from manual SaaS management to automation and start saving on applications rapidly using SaaS cost management software like CloudEagle.

And we’re here to show you why our platform should be your next spend management solution.

SaaS spend management: Why finance teams must pay attention to it

SaaS applications have become the norm for businesses, and teams heavily rely on them for better productivity and collaboration. This resulted in increased spending on these applications, which shows no signs of slowing down in the near future.

SaaS apps are easier to purchase, making it inviting for employees and internal departments to purchase them without the knowledge of finance and IT teams.

This shadow purchase leads to excess SaaS expenses, which the finance team won’t be able to identify or track as the apps weren’t accounted for in the first place.

This is why finance teams need a SaaS to spend management strategy in place.

‍How to manage SaaS spend with CloudEagle

Recession-proofing your business starts here; nailing your SaaS spend optimization strategy will open many opportunities for higher SaaS savings.

This is how CloudEagle will help you optimize SaaS spend,

SaaS Spend visibility

Without SaaS spend visibility, finance teams like yours won’t be able to manage your SaaS spend effectively.

The CloudEagle platform can integrate with your SSO, financial, and HRIS systems to provide a bird's-eye view of your SaaS stack and spending.

While SSO integrations let the platform look into your entire SaaS stack, financial system integrations will provide a detailed view of your spending on each application and vendor.

The CloudEagle platform organizes all application and vendor spend data in individual dashboards to enable finance teams to track SaaS spending effectively.

Direct integrations

CloudEagle directly integrates with applications through custom APIs and provides detailed insights on app usage, spending, and user activity relevant to those applications.

You’ll always have accurate insights on what’s happening within your SaaS stack and can make well-informed spend management decisions.

Spreadsheets

Were you tracking your SaaS applications and spend on spreadsheets?

Upload them to the CloudEagle platform, and it’ll automatically extract all the metadata and organize all the data relevant to each application and vendor in one dashboard.

Now that you’ve got complete visibility into your SaaS spending, here’s how to leverage it.

Eliminate duplicate and free apps

Shadow purchase is one of the primary reasons for increased SaaS spending in businesses. Managing them can be challenging, as the finance teams will be unaware of the applications already in the stack.

That won’t be the case anymore.

With SaaS spend visibility, you can quickly identify applications sanctioned by the team; this will reveal the unsanctioned apps that resulted from shadow purchase/shadow IT.

Predominantly, shadow purchase/IT will increase two types of applications,

• Duplicate apps
• Free apps.

CloudEagle can identify applications with similar functionalities, and you can scrutinize them using the app usage data and eliminate them from your stack to cut costs.

Comparing the total number of apps (SSO integrations) with the total number of paid apps (finance integrations) will reveal the free apps existing in your system.

Often, free apps are the consequence of shadow purchases.

HRIS integrations will reveal the users accessing those free apps, and you can message them to verify the reason for their purchase.

You can eliminate them or verify the app usage data; if the application solves its pain points, you can formally purchase it.

Here's how our customer Rec Room got visibility into free apps, check out this interesting customer success story.

Optimize redundant apps

Redundant apps with unused licenses will only cost you excess dollars.

CloudEagle’s SSO and HRIS integrations will reveal how users access the applications and highlight unused ones.

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For example, your team would’ve been using Zoom for video conferencing but now might’ve switched to Google Meet or Loom for better flexibility, abandoning Zoom altogether.

Now your stack has a redundant application that the finance team might still be paying for or have paid for. CloudEagle will highlight applications like these, making it easier to eliminate them and save on SaaS spend.

Low-usage apps and licenses

Suppose you bought 50 licenses for Hubspot, but your team utilizes only 30; the remaining licenses will be considered abandoned.

Abandoned licenses are not good because you paid for all 50 licenses. Our platform will reveal these unused licenses, and you can right-size the licenses by renegotiating with the vendors.

Pro tip→ It is not advisable to anticipate your growth and buy SaaS licenses too early. Instead, evaluating the usage and purchasing licenses as the demand increases is recommended.

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You can use CloudEagle’s app usage insights to identify the number of unused and low-usage apps.

Huddle with your teams to understand why they are not using the application, pay attention to their requirements, and make informed optimization decisions.

SaaS renewals

To reduce SaaS spend, you must look into all possibilities, primarily renewals. One of the significant consequences of poor app management and shadow purchase is auto-renewals.

In the previous example, we discussed how users abandoned Zoom.

Zoom is now a redundant app in your stack; the finance teams may not be aware of this due to the absence of a centralized management system to identify redundancies. Consequently, Zoom licenses will continue to be automatically renewed, resulting in unnecessary expenses.

The situation is similar for shadow IT and shadow purchase applications; the IT and finance teams may not be aware of these apps existing in your stack, and the contracts will be automatically renewed, resulting in unwanted expenses.

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CloudEagle’s renewal workflows will ensure that you don’t miss contract renewals.

Here's an interesting customer story from Falkonry and how they automated renewals using CloudEagle workflows:

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The platform will create a renewal calendar based on the contract data, initiate renewal workflows 90 days in advance, and automatically send renewal reminders.

Not just simple reminders, the platform will assign individual stakeholders for the renewals and keep escalating them to various users until the SaaS contract is renewed.

During renewals, you can renegotiate with the vendors using price benchmarking and app usage data, identify unused licenses, right-size your licenses, and cut costs.

Reports

CloudEagle’s ‘Reports’ is an exciting feature of the platform. Instead of manually retrieving the spend data, you can specify the time period from when you want to create the report, and CloudEagle will provide a detailed spend data report in a snap.

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• You can generate reports for various condition-based vendor spend data. It’ll also display the vendors that are missing the renewal dates.

Spend attribution

Attributing SaaS spend to each department can be challenging using spreadsheets.

It is necessary to understand how much each department is spending on SaaS applications and vendors. This will help you right-size the licenses and cut down costs.

• You can check department-level spending on dashboards or retrieve relevant department-level data from CloudEagle reports.

Here's a customer success story from Aira and Workspan, showing how CloudEagle helped them with spend visibility.

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How CloudEagle helped a business save on SaaS spending?

Let us tell you a quick customer success story and how they cut their SaaS expenses using CloudEagle.

Wefunder is a popular crowd-funding platform that uses a diverse stack of SaaS applications to create a collaborative and productive work environment.

Spreadsheets

Wefunder followed the traditional way of managing their SaaS applications, i.e., using spreadsheets. This made it hard for the team to track their spending effectively.

Integrations

CloudEagle integrated with their financial systems and provided 100% SaaS spend visibility, but this wasn’t interesting.

CloudEagle revealed that the Wefunder team was spending twice on the same application.

Yes, they paid an annual price for a particular application, but the vendor still charged them a monthly fee. Wefunder's team was unaware of it until CloudEagle’s spend management system pointed it out.

Save on SaaS spend

Thanks to CloudEagle’s detailed reports, Wefunder optimized its spending with that particular vendor, resulting in significant cost savings.

To learn more about this customer story, click here.

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Conclusion

SaaS spend management is not something to be overlooked; when done the right way, it can save your SaaS spend and recession-proof your business.

CloudEagle is one of the most popular SaaS spend optimization platforms, equipped with all the right features to provide 100% SaaS spend visibility, optimize duplicate and redundant apps, automate renewals, and provide detailed reports to help finance teams optimize SaaS spend.

If you’re still using spreadsheets or legacy applications to keep track of your spending, now is the time to switch and leverage accurate cost optimization insights to save on your SaaS spending.

We’re excited to show you how it works and how our platform can help you save on SaaS spend.

Why bother about the economic downturn when you can manage your spending easily?

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