Most accountants would agree that effectively managing multiple SaaS solutions can be an overwhelming challenge.
In this post, you'll discover the top SaaS management platforms tailored for accountants that can help streamline workflows, control costs, and optimize productivity across all your cloud applications.
You'll see an in-depth review of solutions like Torii, Zluri, Blissfully, CloudCheckr, and Apptio - comparing features like automated management, detailed analytics, license optimization, accounting integrations, and more.Follow along to find the ideal platform matching your firm's needs for simplified SaaS orchestration.
Navigating the SaaS Landscape: An Introduction for Accountants
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) market has exploded in recent years, with businesses adopting cloud-based applications at a rapid pace. For accountants, this presents both opportunities and challenges when it comes to managing client subscriptions across a growing array of SaaS vendors. The right SaaS management platform can be a game-changer, helping to rein in costs, streamline workflows, and gain visibility across your SaaS environment.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the top SaaS management solutions for accountants and how they can benefit your firm.
Key Features of SaaS Management Platforms
Leading options like Torii and Zluri offer robust feature sets to help accountants manage SaaS spend and usage. Here are some of the key capabilities:
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Centralized visibility: Get a bird’s-eye view of SaaS apps, licenses, costs, and usage across the organization or client base from a unified dashboard.
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Spend optimization: Identify opportunities to eliminate waste, rightsize subscriptions, leverage discounts, and monitor renewal costs.
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Workflow automation: Configure rules and policies to automatically handle tasks like license provisioning/deprovisioning and more.
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Usage analytics: Gain insights into adoption and value derived from each SaaS investment with detailed usage reporting.
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Seamless integrations: Connect securely and reliably with various SaaS platforms to pull data and maintain an up-to-date catalog.
Why Manage SaaS with Dedicated Software?
With the average organization using over 120 different cloud apps, accounting professionals face an uphill battle to manually stay on top of costs, renewals, and subscriptions. SaaS management software offers a force multiplier with features tailored to simplify workflows for accountants.
Benefits include reducing hours spent tracking and managing licenses and renewals, optimizing costs through usage analytics and right-sizing recommendations, automating administration, ensuring compliance, and more. The right platform empowers accounting teams with the visibility and tools needed to effectively oversee a dynamic SaaS environment.
Evaluating Your Options
When researching SaaS management solutions, key aspects to compare include:
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Integrations - What SaaS platforms can they connect with? How easy is it to add new integrations?
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Ease of use - Is the interface intuitive or cluttered? How steep is the learning curve?
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Customizability - Can rules, policies, fields and other elements be tailored to your needs?
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Reporting and analytics - What data insights can you glean about SaaS usage, costs, etc?
By leveraging purpose-built SaaS management software, accountants can optimize workflows, reduce hours spent on manual tasks, cut unnecessary expenses, and maintain oversight even as the number of cloud apps used continues rising.
How do I choose a SaaS management platform?
When selecting a SaaS management platform, there are several key factors to consider:
Automatic Discovery of SaaS Spend
A robust SaaS management platform should automatically discover all of your organization's SaaS applications and related spend. This gives you full visibility into what services employees are using, how they are being utilized, and what they cost on an ongoing basis. Having a centralized view of SaaS spend empowers you to optimize costs by eliminating duplicate or underutilized applications.
Centralized Contract Management
An effective platform provides a centralized contract repository that tracks details like contract terms, renewal dates, and pricing. This enables you to easily view all of your SaaS agreements in one place, ensuring none expire or auto-renew without your knowledge. You gain control and leverage to renegotiate with vendors from an informed position.
Enhanced SaaS Security
As SaaS usage grows, so does your organization's vulnerability to potential security threats and data breaches. Choosing a platform that centralizes permission controls, implements robust access rules, and provides single sign-on functionality is crucial. This gives you peace of mind that your data and applications are secure.
By carefully evaluating capabilities in vendor intelligence, spend optimization, security, and contract management during your selection process, you can choose the ideal SaaS management platform to meet your organization's unique needs. This empowers you to maximize value as your business adopts more cloud-based applications.
What is a SaaS management platform?
SaaS Management is the business practice of proactively monitoring and managing the purchasing, onboarding, licensing, renewals, and off-boarding of all the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications within a company's technology portfolio.
SaaS management platforms provide a centralized system to gain visibility into a company's entire SaaS stack. Key features include:
- Automated discovery & inventory of all SaaS subscriptions
- Usage analytics & optimization to align spend with business needs
- License management to reduce overages and control costs
- Contract consolidation & renewal management with one view of renewals
- Workflow automation for tasks like onboarding/offboarding
- Spend optimization with recommendations on cost-saving measures
These platforms empower finance teams to manage SaaS sprawl, provide IT more control, enforce security policies, and enable procurement to drive ROI. With rising SaaS adoption, specialized SaaS management solutions have become invaluable for enterprises to gain visibility and control over their stack.
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Decoding the Challenges of SaaS Vendor Management in Accounting
Accounting teams rely heavily on SaaS tools like QuickBooks, Xero, Expensify, Bill.com, and others. Managing multiple subscriptions can be complex and costly without the right SaaS management solution.
The Pitfalls of Manual SaaS Spend Management
Manually tracking SaaS spend across accounting systems often leads to inefficiencies and hidden costs. Common issues include:
- Lacking full visibility into SaaS app usage, making it hard to optimize license counts
- Renewals managed in silos, missing opportunities for volume discounts
- No centralized view of critical data like end dates, billing contacts, and payment methods
- Difficulty tracking ROI on SaaS app investments
- Wasted spend on duplicate or underutilized software products
This fragmented approach prevents finance teams from truly maximizing value from their tech stack. The accounting department risks paying for shelfware subscriptions without a way to efficiently manage SaaS vendors.
Harnessing the Power of SaaS Management Platforms
Forward-thinking accountants turn to SaaS management platforms like Torii and Zluri to simplify licensing, cut costs, and automate workflows. Key benefits include:
- Central SaaS dashboard providing real-time visibility into core metrics like usage, spend, contracts, and renewals
- Optimized costs by right-sizing licenses and leveraging volume discounts
- Streamlined IT workflows with license assignment, single sign-on, and automated provisioning
- Proactive renewal management with expiration notifications and renegotiation opportunities
By consolidating all SaaS operations into a single pane of glass, these tools give accounting leaders powerful insights and automation. The result? IT headaches fade as teams shift focus toward driving business strategy with their refreshed SaaS tech stack.
The Accountant's Toolkit: Top SaaS Account Management Software
We examine the core features, strengths, and considerations of the leading SaaS management platforms.
Torii SaaS Management: Automated Workflows and Spend Optimization
Torii is designed to help manage SaaS applications across enterprises, providing key capabilities like license management, spend optimization, and advanced workflow automation.
It enables finance teams to gain visibility into SaaS spend and make data-driven decisions around cost savings. The platform can track licenses and subscriptions across the organization, identifying opportunities to eliminate waste. Torii also automates manual processes around offboarding employees and reassigning licenses.
Customizable workflows in Torii reduce the burden on finance and IT teams. Alerts and approvals can be configured to enforce governance policies around SaaS procurement and changes. Role-based access provides security and separation of duties.
However, Torii lacks some of the financial analytics and benchmarking offered by other vendors. The interface can also feel overly complex for smaller companies. But for most midsize and large organizations needing advanced SaaS management, Torii is a robust choice.
Zluri: Tailoring SaaS Solutions for Accountants
Zluri distinguishes itself by providing tailored SaaS management capabilities designed specifically for the needs of accounting and finance teams.
It enables real-time visibility into the SaaS landscape, providing insights into license utilization, renewals, and spending across applications. Zluri helps assign and track licenses while optimizing costs by identifying opportunities for consolidation or removal of underutilized SaaS apps.
While other platforms offer similar core capabilities, Zluri stands apart with features like pre-built integrations with common accounting tools and easy importing of trial balance data. These save manual effort while giving finance leaders self-service access to visualizations of departmental SaaS spend.
For most accounting teams overwhelmed by fragmented systems and data, Zluri makes it simple to aggregate everything needed to make data-driven decisions on SaaS investments.
Essential Criteria for Selecting SaaS Management Platforms for Accountants
As an accountant, having visibility into software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending is critical for cost optimization. The right SaaS management platform centralizes visibility, automates management workflows, seamlessly connects with essential apps like QuickBooks and Xero, and provides exceptional support.
When evaluating solutions, focus on five key aspects:
Achieving Centralized Visibility and SaaS Spend Management
A unified dashboard is invaluable for analyzing SaaS usage, spend, and ROI across the organization. As an accountant, you need clear visibility into which teams are using which apps, renewal/billing details, and overall costs.
Choose a platform that offers:
- Comprehensive visibility into all cloud apps from one centralized platform
- Ability to track real-time and historical SaaS spend
- Custom reporting and analytics for usage, cost allocation, and return on SaaS investments
- Data integrations with expense management systems
With robust visibility and analytics, you can optimize budgets, eliminate redundant apps, negotiate better contracts, and enable data-driven SaaS management.
Optimizing SaaS Vendor Management with License Capabilities
Managing software licenses manually is tedious and error-prone. The right SaaS management solution centralizes license tracking across cloud apps and enables optimization.
Key license management capabilities include:
- Central registry of license counts, usage, expiration dates, and ownership details
- Monitoring tools to identify unused/underutilized licenses for reallocation
- Workflow automation to seamlessly add/remove licenses based on team needs
- Role-based access controls for self-service license management
Automated management of cloud licenses improves efficiency, reduces overspending, and enables scaling teams cost-effectively.
Maximizing Efficiency: Workflow Automation in SaaS Platforms
Handling SaaS administration manually drains productivity. Platforms that provide approval workflows and task automation enable you to manage renewals, allocate resources, control costs, and optimize spending efficiently.
Ideally, the platform should enable:
- Custom renewals, change orders, license change workflows
- Conditional, automated policy-driven approvals
- Bulk user management across SaaS apps
- API integrations with procurement systems
- Native mobile apps for on-the-go administration
With workflow automation, you can save hours typically spent on manual software administration.
Integration Ease: Connecting QuickBooks & Xero with SaaS Solutions
As an accountant, QuickBooks and Xero integrations are a must-have to seamlessly incorporate SaaS management data into your accounting platform and workflows.
Choose a solution that offers:
- Native one-click integration with QuickBooks Online and Xero
- Automated syncing of SaaS spend data into accounting system
- Ability to push/pull supplier, customer, item data from accounting platform
- Support for custom field mapping between platforms
Easy interconnectivity eliminates manual data entry and reconciliation between systems.
Ensuring Quality Help & Support in SaaS Account Management
With a complex SaaS management solution, access to stellar technical support and onboarding assistance is vital for long-term success.
Look for a vendor that provides:
- Onboarding - Dedicated reps to guide implementation & training
- Education - Webinars, online courses, in-product videos
- Community - Peer forums to connect and collaborate
- Support - 24/7 online + phone assistance from qualified reps
Robust customer support, education, and onboarding will help you maximize value from the platform and manage your SaaS stack effectively.
With the above key aspects covered, an SaaS management platform can transform how you administer and optimize your cloud app stack - enabling clearer visibility, improved workflows, integrated accounting system connectivity, and helpful education/support. Evaluate solutions against these criteria to choose the ideal fit for your client accounting needs.
Mastering SaaS Efficiency: Wrapping Up for Accountants
As an accountant, managing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications efficiently is critical for optimizing workflows and controlling costs. The right SaaS management platform provides the integrations, automation, and analytics needed to streamline financial operations.
When evaluating your options, focus on platforms purpose-built for accounting teams. Key features to look for include:
Automated SaaS Spend Management
A unified dashboard to track real-time spend across all SaaS apps. Built-in controls around budget thresholds. Custom reporting to identify savings opportunities.
Workflows and Approvals
Streamline purchase requests, license assignments, renewals, and cancellations through configurable workflows. Maintain separation of duties with role-based approvals.
Usage Analytics
In-depth visibility into adoption and engagement levels. Ability to identify underutilized licenses to reallocate or cancel. Optimized license planning.
Integration with Financial Systems
Two-way sync with accounting software like QuickBooks and Netsuite. Automated invoice processing and spend categorization. Eliminate manual data entry.
Security and Access Controls
Granular access permissions to enforce least privilege principles. Automated offboarding to revoke SaaS access when employees leave. Single sign-on for simplified access.
By implementing the right SaaS management solution tailored to accounting teams, you can work faster and smarter - while keeping costs under tight control. Reach out to explore whether a purpose-built platform can help take your financial workflows to the next level.
