According to Gartner, the average company wastes nearly 30% of its SaaS budget on unused or duplicate subscriptions. As SaaS tools multiply across teams, controlling costs and maintaining visibility have become real challenges for finance leaders.

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This makes it essential to talk about decentralized SaaS buying and how it impacts spend visibility, renewals, and control. Let’s look at why ineffective SaaS spend management can quickly become a problem and what can be done about it.

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What is spend management?

Spend management is the process of tracking, controlling, and optimizing how a company spends money across vendors, procurement, and SaaS tools. It helps businesses gain visibility into expenses, reduce waste, and improve financial efficiency through better budgeting and data-driven decisions.

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Top 7 Spend Management Challenges & How to Overcome Them

1. Lack of visibility into SaaS spending

Challenge: Buying SaaS tools is easy, managing them isn’t. Employees often sign up for new tools without notice, leading to hidden renewals and duplicate apps. Contracts stored in inboxes or scattered drives make it harder to track costs, usage limits, or vendor clauses.

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How to overcome it: Use a centralized spend management system like Spendflo to track every subscription, renewal, and contract in one dashboard. It helps finance teams identify unused licenses, avoid vendor lock-ins, and gain complete visibility across all SaaS spending.

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2. Poor forecasting due to missing data

Challenge: Without accurate data, predicting future SaaS costs becomes guesswork. Multiple data sources and manual tracking make it tough to analyze trends or identify inefficiencies.

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How to overcome it: Automate SaaS tracking with analytics tools that consolidate usage and spending data. This allows finance and procurement teams to build accurate forecasts and optimize budgets based on real usage and renewal cycles.

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3. Overspending from unmanaged or duplicate subscriptions

Challenge: When employees buy tools independently, companies often pay more than necessary sometimes even for duplicate apps. For example, several team members might pay for individual plans instead of a shared team plan, multiplying costs unnecessarily.

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How to overcome it: Create a unified procurement process that requires approvals before any purchase. A platform like Spendflo flags duplicate subscriptions, compares vendor pricing, and ensures teams always get the best deal.

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4. Inability to measure ROI on SaaS tools

Challenge: Many organizations don’t evaluate whether their tools deliver measurable returns. Without clear ROI metrics, renewals become automatic, and underperforming apps remain unnoticed.

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How to overcome it: Track performance metrics such as adoption rate, time saved, and cost per active user. Tools like Spendflo help you map every SaaS tool’s value against its cost so you can make renewal decisions confidently.

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5. Compliance delays caused by scattered contracts

Challenge: When contracts are stored across inboxes and drives, compliance audits slow down. Missed renewal dates or untracked clauses can lead to surprise costs and data risks.

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How to overcome it: Store all contracts in a secure, searchable repository. Spendflo’s centralized contract management lets teams access key details quickly, speed up compliance checks, and prevent surprise renewals.

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6. Data Privacy, Security & Compliance Challenges

Challenge: Modern spend management platforms handle sensitive financial and vendor data, which can expose companies to cybersecurity and compliance risks. Data breaches, poor access controls, or non-adherence to regulations like GDPR can result in legal and reputational damage.

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How to overcome it: Adopt systems that prioritize data privacy in spend management with strong data encryption, multi-level access controls, and regular third-party security audits. Solutions like Spendflo ensure data security through compliant infrastructure, helping organizations meet global privacy and cybersecurity standards in expense management while reducing compliance risks.

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7. Integration Challenges

Challenge: A common barrier in spend management is integration complexity. When your spend management system doesn’t sync with ERP or financial software, it creates duplicate entries, broken data flows, and reporting gaps.

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How to overcome it: Choose a spend management platform with flexible API integrations that connect easily to your ERP, finance, and procurement systems. Spendflo’s architecture supports seamless financial system synchronization and ERP integration, ensuring your spend data stays accurate and up to date across every platform.

What are the solutions for efficient SaaS spend management?  

Here are some sure-shot ways in which you can combat the above avoidable problems:

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1. Have a single source of truth for all things SaaS

One effective solution to tackle the issue of scattered SaaS information is handling and storing every detail on a single dashboard. You could start small with online database tools such as Airtable and Notion or go plain and simple by using regular spreadsheets. 

Also, educate your employees to follow regular spreadsheet updates every time a new subscription or renewal is made. This way, there's no more loss of critical data in multiple inboxes. 

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But there's a catch. Spreadsheets or modern databases and tracking tools like Airtable have limited functionalities. Instead, a SaaS spend management software such as Spendflo can take such admin tasks off your hands. It can centralize all your SaaS details related to subscriptions and manage inventory to save you time and immense manual labor. 

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2. Understand Employee SaaS usage

It is imperative to understand how employees use SaaS that they bought. Do they actually need it? How often have they accessed it? When was the last time they accessed it?

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Having this data will aid better decision-making while formulating SaaS renewal strategies. 

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3. Conduct employee surveys to understand which SaaS tools work or don't 

Most SaaS tools are bought to increase employee collaboration and productivity. Therefore, it's just as important to find out if the end-users are happy with the tools.  You can lead the way by conducting frequent employee surveys to understand their sentiments with respect to the tools they are using.

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Most of the tools could be pricier for current market standards, incompatible, or even redundant. Regular employee surveys help gather data that can drive better decisions during renewals.  It also curbs unwanted auto-renewals and decreases your SaaS spending rapidly.

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4. Research pricing of SaaS tools and their competitors

Performing thorough competitor research on various price points and plans can help you and your teams make intelligent purchase decisions and get the best market deals. Hurried and overlooked purchases are bad news for successful SaaS spend management.

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A more productive approach is to use a platform like Spendflo, which has industry-standard benchmarks for each of your SaaS tools. Using Spendflo saves you time and money. It helps keep track of your SaaS expenses, from purchasing to monitoring every aspect of the usage. 

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5. Consolidate all of your contracts in one place

Double-checking contracts is crucial to avoid future vendor lock-ins due to auto-renewal or cancellation clauses that might cost you a lot of money or, worse - penalties. But if there's a lack of a streamlined process to collect and store your contracts, it can get super exhausting to manage your SaaS subscriptions.

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A perfect solution to manage your contracts is consolidating and accessing them through a single repository. A SaaS spend management tool can be a great alternative to all the manual effort that consolidates and revisits your contracts. 

6. Managing Change & Ensuring Adoption of Spend Management Solutions

Adopting a new spend management system isn’t just a technology decision it’s a people decision. Success depends on how well employees understand and embrace the tool. Lack of user adoption can delay ROI and limit the impact of your investment.

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How to ensure adoption:

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• Provide structured employee training: Offer hands-on sessions that explain how the new system simplifies their daily tasks.
• Communicate clearly: Keep all stakeholders informed about what’s changing, why it matters, and how it benefits them.
• Encourage leadership buy-in: When leaders advocate for the system, teams are more likely to adopt it.
• Track engagement: Monitor how often users log in, complete approvals, or update data. Use this to refine your training plan.

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Building a culture of adoption ensures long-term success. Effective change management, supported by employee training strategies and leadership involvement, helps organizations fully realize the benefits of spend management implementation.

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Why Leading Teams Trust Spendflo to Take Control of SaaS Spend

Every month, finance and procurement teams lose visibility over renewals, duplicate subscriptions, and unused tools, draining budgets that could be invested elsewhere. For a growing company, this lack of control can quickly spiral into wasted time and lost capital.

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Take the case of a mid-market tech firm that used Spendflo to centralize its SaaS procurement. Within 60 days, they brought 70% of their SaaS spend under management, eliminated redundant tools, and saved over 30% on software costs, all without adding headcount.

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These results aren’t rare. Many teams face the same pain point: managing SaaS manually across spreadsheets and inboxes. Spendflo simplifies that process with a single dashboard for visibility, automated renewals, and expert-led savings support.

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If your organization is ready to cut waste, bring control back to procurement, and see measurable savings fast, it’s time to take the next step.

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Book your free demo with Spendflo and see how you can turn SaaS chaos into predictable, scalable savings.

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FAQs

1. What is maverick spending and how can it be controlled?

Maverick spending happens when employees make purchases outside the approved procurement process, often by buying SaaS tools directly without finance or procurement oversight. This leads to duplicate tools, missed renewals, and poor budget control. The best way to manage it is by using a centralized spend management platform that enforces approval workflows, gives visibility into every purchase, and ensures all spending aligns with company policies.

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2. Why is manual expense processing a challenge, and how can automation help?

Manual expense processing takes time, increases the risk of human error, and slows down financial reporting. Teams often chase invoices or reconcile data across spreadsheets, which leads to inefficiencies and delayed decisions. Automation simplifies this by capturing spent data in real time, syncing it with financial systems, and reducing the administrative burden. With automation tools like Spendflo, finance teams can focus on analysis and strategy instead of manual data entry.

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3. How does limited real-time visibility impact spend management?

Without real-time visibility, businesses struggle to understand where their money is going and which subscriptions are actually used. This lack of insight can lead to overspending, missed renewals, and compliance risks. Real-time spend tracking gives finance and procurement leaders the transparency they need to manage budgets proactively, eliminate waste, and make data-driven decisions that improve cost efficiency across the organization.

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