Original article: SaaS spending out of control? Here’s how to reclaim your budget

SaaS spending out of control? Here’s how to reclaim your budget

The rapid growth of SaaS applications has given organizations more agility and speed – but it has also brought new challenges. In many companies, business teams are quick to adopt the tools they need, while IT struggles to maintain full visibility. As a result, overlapping subscriptions, shadow IT services, and mounting invoices often go unnoticed and unmanaged.

The transparency gap: a defining challenge of the SaaS era

Without centralized control, SaaS expenses can quickly spiral out of control.

• unused licenses and duplicate subscriptions remain active;
• budgets become difficult to forecast and justify;
• security and compliance oversight weakens;
• auto-renewals occur without proper review.

Over time, SaaS stops being a driver of efficiency and turns into a source of financial and operational risk.

Why traditional approaches no longer work

When SaaS adoption was limited, managing subscriptions manually – in Excel or local spreadsheets – was feasible. Today, however, an average organization runs dozens or even hundreds of cloud services. Data becomes outdated, spreadsheets are inconsistent, and IT, finance, and procurement teams lose a unified view of spending and usage.

Centralization and automation: regaining control

To restore transparency, organizations need to consolidate information about all subscriptions and automate key management processes. Modern SAM-solutions such as Flexera One and Snow, as well as some ITSM platforms such as Freshservice (not that complete, but still good) provide a single, comprehensive view of the entire SaaS landscape – from everyday productivity and collaboration tools (Microsoft 365, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace) to enterprise platforms (Salesforce, SAP Concur, ServiceNow, Adobe Creative Cloud). These systems track user activity, identify unused licenses, and prevent overspending, ensuring unified control across SaaS and cloud environments.

What companies can do today

Controlling SaaS-services and even wider, enabling FinOps, is not an easy walk, but every organization in the modern world has to find out its own way through it. What you can do today is:

1. Audit all active SaaS applications and remove those that are no longer needed.
2. Compare subscriptions across departments to eliminate duplicates.
3. Set up automated renewal tracking and expiration notifications.
4. Implement monitoring tools to identify inactive licenses.
5. Educate employees to request and use approved SaaS services via the ITSM portal.

Managing SaaS effectively is not a one-off initiative – it’s an ongoing discipline. The sooner a company brings order to its subscriptions, the faster it will regain transparency and reduce unnecessary costs. This is less about technology and more about process maturity and governance culture.

At Synta, we help organizations in CIS (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan) bring structure to their SaaS environments – from cost audits and subscription rationalization to implementing automated controls. Our experts will share practical insights and real-world examples at the upcoming webinar on SaaS cost optimization with Flexera One. Registration is now open on our website.

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