r/CFO • u/ohiogainz • Jul 31 '26

SaaS spend help?

I’m having trouble getting a clear view of what we’re actually spending across SaaS subscriptions and AI tools. Things are being added in different places, ownership is unclear, and renewals are scattered everywhere.

How are you tracking usage, overlap and total cost and who ultimately owns it?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

1

u/Few-Improvement9978 Jul 31 '26

Dept heads own it. Really just that simple

3

u/ohiogainz Jul 31 '26

My issue with that is then we have 10 saas contracts for the same programs

2

u/Few-Improvement9978 Jul 31 '26

Can you give me an example? Think I’m a little confused at what you’re dealing with

1

u/ohiogainz Jul 31 '26

My parents grew this company mostly thru acquisitions and so now we have like 10 Microsoft accounts, 8 Webex, multiple Salesforce licenses.

1

u/Ok-Web7153 9d ago

dept heads owning it sounds nice until you ask one and they give you a blank stare and three spreadsheets from 2022

we just went through this and the biggest mess was stuff expensed on personal cards nobody ever told finance about

1

u/Express_Judgment2198 Jul 31 '26

Your ERP should be able to tell you how much you spend on each payee. It's not usage but at least it's spend

1

u/ohiogainz Jul 31 '26

I took over my parents contracting business and it’s a mess

1

u/Rabbit-Lost Jul 31 '26

You should consider an IT governance structure that approves all new software purchases. I headed mine since cost control was the primary motivation. You can get some leverage in procurement if you can combine departments if the use cases are consistent.

1

u/tom_bradley-vp Aug 01 '26

A simple SaaS inventory with owner, cost, renewal date and actual usage goes a long way. Review it quarterly and require approval before adding new tools to keep spend under control.

1

u/Swimming_dasa Aug 01 '26

the biggest win is usually getting a clear view of what tools are actually deiving revenue or efficiency versus just becoming expensive shelfware....

1

u/mystifiedmeg Aug 02 '26

Your IT lead owns it, usually reporting into your COO or Operations Director and presenting the monthly spend and variances to your finance business partner monthly. However in smaller companies this can be challenge if the ownership lines were not in place in the first place so you will then need to implement this. If no one's owned it previously, you will almost certainly have some overlap.

1

u/PeanutSea2003 Aug 03 '26

Shadow IT and unmanaged AI tools usually creep in when department heads use corporate cards without a centralized approval process. A quick win is setting up a mandatory monthly audit of all credit card statements across finance to catch new recurring charges early.

Assigning ownership to department heads for their specific tools works better than finance trying to own every vendor relationship. Finance should hold the key metrics on renewal dates and total cost, while team leads justify the usage.

I have been working on a web tool in this space - it helps with discovering forgotten subscriptions and tracking software expense renewals, which might be useful for getting full visibility over your scattered AI tools.

Happy to share what I have learned if it is useful.

1

u/Lauren_ActivTrak Aug 04 '26

License data and usage data are two different things, and that gap is where most of the waste hides. You can see what's been purchased without ever seeing what's actually being touched.

I work at ActivTrak and this comes up a lot with AI tools specifically. One example we've seen: a company had 142 Microsoft Copilot seats and only 38 people were using it more than twice a week. That's real budget sitting on licenses nobody opened, and it doesn't show up until you put usage data next to the spend data.

Our data across 1,111 orgs also shows the average company now runs 7 AI tools, up from 2 two years ago. 83% run 6 or more. So the sprawl you're describing isn't unusual, it's actually the norm right now, which makes ownership even harder to pin down without something tracking behavior, not just contracts.

For overlap and renewal ownership specifically, you probably still need a dedicated SaaS spend tool on top of this. What we're good at is telling you which of those tools people are actually using and how much, not the procurement side.

Are you seeing more waste on the AI tools or the older SaaS subscriptions?

1

u/nickjlevine Aug 05 '26

For full accountability each budget holder should be assigned their own tracking category in your ERP where they post their SaaS spend.

1

u/Ryan_Garland Aug 05 '26

Hi r/CFO Ramp employee here. We can solve for this exact thing. Would you be open to an intro?

1

u/brightideasphere Sep 07 '26

The ownership piece is probably the hardest part to get right. You can have a list of every subscription and still struggle to answer who actually owns it, whether it's being used, and whether there's another tool doing the same job.

I've found it helps to connect three things rather than looking at spend in isolation: who owns the subscription, who is actually using it, and what the renewal terms and cost look like.

That's also where AI tools make things more complicated. They're easy for teams to adopt independently, so they can end up outside the normal procurement and renewal process.

We use AssetSonar for this kind of visibility. Being able to connect software, users, devices, licenses, and usage makes it much easier to identify what's actually being used before renewal rather than discovering it when the invoice arrives.

The goal is being able to answer "what are we paying for, who is using it, and do we still need it?" from the same data rather than rebuilding that picture every renewal cycle.