Did you know that the average mid-size business has 100+ SaaS apps in place? Even with numbers that high, the majority of businesses still track their SaaS apps with an Excel or Google spreadsheet. If you’re one of them, then you probably know first-hand how unwieldy and inefficient managing a SaaS program manually with a spreadsheet can be.
In this post, we take a deeper look at why tracking internal SaaS usage with a spreadsheet has become increasingly difficult, and offer a more effective approach going forward.
The Challenges of Tracking SaaS Apps in a Spreadsheet
First off, it’s worth stating: A spreadsheet is better than nothing. An imperfect organizational system is much better than none at all, so if that’s where you are today, know that you are still moving in the right direction.
Now, let’s take a look at why this approach can be so challenging, and where many organizations need to make improvements.
Staying on Top of Changing Subscriptions
If you’re already using spreadsheets, you know it can be really tough to stay on top of them. For one, SaaS apps are constantly rotating in and out of organizations. This is normal; part of the value of apps delivered via the cloud is that it’s easy to spin them up and down based on what your team needs at any given moment.
But this also means a manual spreadsheet requires you to continually check in with your team about whether they have added or subtracted apps from the roster. Inevitably, something falls through the cracks and doesn’t make it to the spreadsheet. It’s hard — if not impossible — to stay on top of the ever-changing rotation of SaaS subscriptions in any given organization, at least if you’re trying to do it manually.
Managing Ownership and Update Frequency
The task of keeping an internal SaaS spreadsheet up-to-date is a massive one. It could easily take up the majority of one team member’s time to update things like:
Number of subscriptions or apps from each vendor
- Number of seats per app
- Cost per month or year
- Renewal dates
- Ownership
- Compliance status
- Processes related to onboarding and offboarding
- Security
- Privacy
And lots more!
It’s almost certainly too much for one person. Yet if updating the spreadsheet is delegated across multiple team members, responsibility can become confusing and, again, items may fall through the cracks.
As far as the mechanics of remembering to update the spreadsheet, teams could set calendar reminders to do this, but at what frequency? It’s not a rote or predictable task, since (as we mentioned earlier), subscriptions change all the time.
For these reasons, even the most organized person or company will struggle to keep manual spreadsheets completely up to date.
Minimizing Human Error
Finally, spreadsheets—because they are maintained manually—are naturally error-prone. Whether it’s a mistyped line item or a small change that happened without notification (like a seat being added or a price increase from the vendor), these documents quickly become full of small mistakes that add up to an inaccurate picture of your SaaS landscape.
A Better Way Forward: SaaS Management
Rather than manually maintaining a spreadsheet of your SaaS subscriptions, we recommend you invest in a SaaS management platform. This way, you can use a single platform to view invoices, manage renewals, create approval workflows, and track compliance. In one pane of glass, you can view all of your SaaS apps, who is using them, and how much you’re spending on them.
Here’s what that looks like with Blissfully:
As you can see, a SaaS management platform allows you to automatically track all of the vendors your organization is using, as well as the number of subscriptions from each (since you may have different apps or multiple of the same app for different teams.) It will let you see at a glance how much you are spending annually and when subscriptions are set to renew.
Additionally, responsibility is clear because you can assign an owner to each vendor. If HR or finance has a question about how a particular program is being used, what it takes to onboard a new team member, or why the bill for AdWords is so high this month, they will know exactly who to go to for answers.
If your organization follows compliance or legal frameworks like GDPR or SOC 2, a SaaS management tool will also let you verify at a glance that you have only invested in tools that are also compliant with those regulations and requirements. This reduces your organizational risk and saves time and headaches when you have audits.
Say Goodbye to SaaS Spreadsheets Once and For All
Replace your dreaded SaaS spreadsheet. Use one platform to view invoices, manage renewals, create approval workflows, and track compliance. See all of your SaaS apps, who’s using them, and how much you’re spending on them.
Get the visibility and tools you need to take control of SaaS across your organization.