Who Is a Budget Owner and How Their Role Impacts Your Expenses

Managing SaaS budgets is an essential prerequisite to successfully implementing and maximizing the value of SaaS tools within an organization.

Without a dedicated budget owner overseeing SaaS spending, tracking utilization, and ensuring alignment with business objectives, an organization's SaaS investments can quickly spiral out of control. Unmanaged SaaS sprawl leads to wasted spend, overlapping tools, and a lack of visibility into the SaaS stack's performance. 

But if you're serious about optimizing your SaaS stack and getting the most bang for your buck, appointing a SaaS budget owner is critical. In this guide, we'll cover who the SaaS budget owner is, their key roles and responsibilities, and the challenges they face. 

Let's dive in:

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Who is a SaaS Budget Owner?

The SaaS budget owner is the individual tasked with managing and overseeing an organization's budget for SaaS tools and subscriptions. Typically someone in Finance, IT, or Procurement, the SaaS budget owner ensures that SaaS spending supports the company's goals and that the organization achieves maximum ROI from its SaaS investments.

The SaaS budget owner serves as the central point of contact for all things related to an organization's SaaS budget and tech stack. They work cross-functionally with IT, Finance, Procurement, and other departments to align SaaS investments with business needs.

Roles and Responsibilities of the SaaS Budget Owner

The SaaS budget owner wears many hats to effectively manage an organization's SaaS budget and tools.

Key responsibilities include:

- Developing and managing the SaaS budget 

- Evaluating and approving SaaS purchase requests

- Tracking SaaS spending and utilization

- Identifying opportunities to optimize SaaS costs

- Ensuring compliance with SaaS contracts and licenses

- Working with IT to implement and govern SaaS tools

- Providing visibility into the SaaS stack's performance

- Leading SaaS renewal and vendor negotiation processes

To excel in this role, the SaaS budget owner must have a deep understanding of the SaaS market, strong financial acumen, and the ability to build relationships with stakeholders across the organization. 

They need to balance enabling teams with the right tools and keeping spending in check.

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Challenges of Being a SaaS Budget Owner

While critical to SaaS success, being a SaaS budget owner is no easy feat. Common challenges include:

Tracking and Monitoring SaaS Budgets

With SaaS sprawls running rampant in most organizations, simply getting a handle on all the SaaS tools in use and their associated costs is a huge undertaking. SaaS budget owners often lack visibility into shadow IT and struggle to track spending across multiple departments and credit cards.

Dealing with Unplanned SaaS Expenses

SaaS costs can quickly get out of hand due to automatic renewals, unexpected price increases, and unbudgeted license adds. Staying on top of all the moving parts requires constant vigilance from the SaaS budget owner.

Making Sense of Complex SaaS Pricing 

SaaS pricing models can be very complex with various fees, usage-based charges, discounts and more. Unpacking vendor pricing to understand the true cost and value is critical but time-consuming.

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Tips for Tracking and Monitoring SaaS Budgets

Despite the challenges, there are several best practices SaaS budget owners can employ to effectively track and monitor SaaS budgets:

1. Conduct a comprehensive SaaS audit

Performing a thorough audit of your organization's SaaS stack is the first step to gaining visibility and control over SaaS spend. This process involves inventorying all SaaS tools in use across the organization, including those procured outside of IT (shadow IT). 

To do this effectively:

•  Work with IT to pull reports from single sign-on (SSO) and identity access management (IAM) systems to identify all SaaS logins.
•  Survey department leaders and end-users to uncover additional tools they are using.
•  Check financial records and expense reports for SaaS transactions.
•  Use a SaaS management platform to automatically discover and inventory SaaS apps.

 For each SaaS tool identified, gather key details such as: owner, number of licenses, subscription term, renewal date, cost, payment method, and contract terms. 

Organizing this information in a central system of record will provide the foundation for ongoing SaaS budget management.

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2. Establish SaaS purchase policies and approval workflows

To rein in SaaS sprawl and uncontrolled spending, it's critical to implement formal policies and processes around SaaS procurement. 

This includes:

•  Developing clear guidelines on who can purchase SaaS, what tools are allowed, and how much can be spent.
•  Defining an approval matrix based on spend thresholds, data risk levels, and strategic importance.
•  Implementing workflows to route SaaS purchase requests through the appropriate approvals.
•  Requiring all contracts to be negotiated and signed by Procurement/Legal.
•  Mandating that all SaaS invoices be paid through a central Accounts Payable system.

The SaaS budget owner should work with IT, Procurement, and Finance to align on policies and embed them into procurement systems and processes.

3. Implement SaaS spend tagging and reporting

To provide visibility into SaaS spending patterns and trends, budget owners need granular reporting capabilities. 

This can be achieved by implementing a tagging system to categorize SaaS spend by relevant dimensions such as:

   - Department/cost center

   - Team/project

   - Function (e.g. Marketing, Sales, Engineering)

   - Spend category (e.g. Productivity, Security, Analytics)

   - Renewal date

   - Vendor

Tags can be applied in the organization's financial system or in a dedicated SaaS management platform. 

Once spend is properly categorized, budget owners can run reports and analyze data to:

   - Compare SaaS spend to budget at the department or category level

   - Identify the fastest growing areas of spend

   - Detect anomalies or unexpected charges

   - Forecast future spend based on historical trends

   - Benchmark SaaS spend against similar companies

  These insights arm SaaS budget owners to have data-driven conversations with stakeholders, identify cost savings opportunities, and make informed decisions about SaaS investments.

4. Monitor SaaS utilization and adoption

Tracking SaaS spend is only half the battle. To ensure the organization is getting maximum value from its SaaS investments, budget owners must also monitor utilization and adoption. 

This involves:

• Integrating with SaaS vendors' APIs to pull usage data
• Analyzing login activity to identify inactive or underutilized licenses
• Measuring feature-level usage to determine if key capabilities are being leveraged
• Tracking license assignments to detect orphaned or duplicate accounts
• Gathering qualitative feedback from end-users on their satisfaction and productivity

Armed with this data, SaaS budget owners can work with department leaders to drive adoption, right-size license counts, and ultimately increase ROI. They can also use utilization insights to inform renewal negotiations and get better pricing on underutilized tools. 

How Spendflo Helps You Cut Down Excess Spending on SaaS with Assisted Buying

At Spendflo, we understand the unique challenges SaaS budget owners face in managing expenses and maximizing ROI. That's why our assisted buying platform is designed to help you cut down on excess spending and make informed, data-driven purchasing decisions.

Here's how it works:

• AI-powered SaaS pricing intelligence to ensure you get the best deals and discounts.
• Streamlined vendor evaluation and selection with objective reviews and comparisons.
• Expert negotiation support and contract review services to secure optimal terms and mitigate risks.

Try Spendflo Now!

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