The Downside of SaaS Spreadsheet Management

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As the rise of SaaS tools and remote working conditions continue to surge, companies of all sizes, from SMBs to mid-market, are spending more on SaaS than ever. Based on Hudled data, the average scale-up company is paying for 121 tools and $1.08M per year on average.

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While this has provided teams with outstanding products that help improve their productivity, it also comes with several drawbacks due to the need for more SaaS visibility for finance teams who notably manage SaaS on a spreadsheet.
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What is SaaS spreadsheet management?

SaaS Spreadsheet Management is when a company manually adds all their SaaS on a spreadsheet. Typically the finance person will extract all vendors into excel or sheets and summarise the data with a SUMIF function or pivot table. SaaS visibility for finance and the broader company is limited due to the inherent nature of manually maintaining all the fields in the spreadsheet.

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What are the downsides of SaaS spreadsheet management?

Spreadsheets do a great job of tracking many things. Unfortunately, SaaS isn’t one of them. In a dynamic environment, the spreadsheet falls short, and finance teams typically see these common issues:

1. Manual data entry: Spreadsheets are prone to error when humans are relied upon. A simple typo or missed entry could waste thousands of dollars if a renewal is forgotten.
2. Lack of real-time visibility: Spreadsheets quickly become outdated, and it’s not a true reflection of the SaaS costs going through the business.
3. Time-consuming: Preparing your spreadsheet in the first instance is time-consuming, but maintaining it is a whole new beast. Managing and updating all the SaaS tools is a full-time job that doesn’t yield any praise within the business. The likely outcome of this project is that it gets forgotten about or is poorly maintained.
4. Limited functionality: From a spreadsheet, you can see basic information like total spend, but that’s about it. If you want insights into where you are overspending, you won’t be able to do this on a spreadsheet.
5. Compliance: Managing sensitive information such as license data has significant drawbacks, and it could breach your internal policies and procedures.
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SaaS management with Hudled

Adopting a SaaS management tool like Hudled is the first step towards using data to get the most out of your SaaS stack. Within minutes, you’ll get the following:

1. SaaS visibility: Gain control of SaaS spend and say goodbye to laborious data entry. Hudled can connect to your accounting software in minutes and automatically identify all the SaaS tools.
2. Automated renewal detection: Our renewal algorithm will scan and automatically populate your monthly, quarterly, and annual renewals.
3. Line item analysis: Receive granular insight and the spend breakdown for every vendor. Having visibility on this data will help employees across the company from purchasing tools with similar functionality.
4. Benchmarking: Compare what you spend against other companies similar to you. Get actionable insights on where you are overpaying.
5. Cross-team collaboration: Leaders in different departments can access the company’s SaaS spend in minutes and see what’s being used by other teams.
6. Manage budgets: Know what you’re spending in real-time without relying on a version-controlled spreadsheet.
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How to get started

Don’t let manual spreadsheets control your business decisions - gain control of your SaaS spend, embrace SaaS management and create SaaS visibility for finance and the entire company. Get started for free today and request a SaaS audit to see where you’re overspending.