What is the Best SaaS Spend Management Software?

SaaS investments often rank among a company's top three budget expenses. While these software purchases drive automation and solve critical problems, many organizations unknowingly overpay by nearly 30%. This unnecessary spending can significantly hinder growth and profitability, especially when millions of dollars are at stake. 

Enter spend management software: a powerful solution to this widespread issue. By providing complete visibility into your tech stack and optimizing the software buying process, these platforms enable businesses to streamline purchasing, gain actionable insights, make informed decisions, and negotiate better contracts. 

Read on to explore how spend management software empowers organizations to take control of their SaaS expenditure and maximize the value of their technology investments.

What is Spend Management Software?

Traditional spend management relies heavily on internal financial data to guide sourcing and procurement. Its sole focus is on maximizing value while managing costs, reducing risk, and strengthening vendor relationships. The approach typically involves spend analysis, strategic sourcing, and supplier relationship management to give companies an insight into their spending patterns.

However, this approach often lacks external insight and AI-enhanced processes. This limits finance and procurement teams' abilities to gauge competitive pricing, refine buying strategies, and maximize operational efficiency.

Tropic takes spend management to its next step in evolution. By using Intelligent Spend Management, Tropic brings third-party market insights directly into the buying process and uses AI to streamline workflows and data queries. This helps maximize value, enhance efficiency, and improve the bottom line. By utilizing real-time data and AI, Intelligent Spend Management ensures cost reduction, financial risk mitigation, and stronger supplier relationships, ultimately driving better outcomes for the organization.

The Key Features of Tropic’s Spend Management Software

Tropic's spend management platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools that provides visibility, control, and leverage of expenses:

Automated Procurement Orchestration

Achieve unparalleled speed with one URL to guide employees through every purchase request. Intelligent forms with straightforward customization support from intake to contract signature, making it easy to track purchases for compliance and efficiency. 

Sourcing Intelligence

Tropic provides the largest unbiased database of software marketing data, delivering price benchmarks and contextual negotiation strategies you can trust, ensuring you always pay the right price for SaaS. 

Shadow Spend Detection

Automatically identify suppliers that haven’t gone through the correct approval processes or are missing critical information to track down shadow spending and reduce waste. 

Streamlined Vendor Management

Manage all software contracts within your own Tropic Contracts & Supplier database. Monitor actual spending against contracted spend down to the supplier level and manage auto-renewals with automated alerts so spend doesn’t fall through the cracks 

Expert Coaching and Assisted Purchasing

Let Tropic’s experienced SaaS specialists provide the guidance and coaching you need to buy at competitive prices. Alternatively, outsource your SaaS contract negotiations to Tropic and let us get you the best deal every time.

What are the Benefits of Using Tropic?

The powerful tools and features within the Tropic platform deliver several benefits to organizations, including: 

• Cost Reduction and Optimization: Save 17%+ on software spend by eliminating redundant services, improving contract negotiations, and streamlining procurement tasks. Manage all your SaaS spend from a single platform. 
• Improved Procurement Efficiency: Intake automation, approval orchestration, contract tracking, and easy-to-use dashboards all make procurement simpler and faster. 
• Enhanced Visibility and Control: Gain real-time, 100% visibility into all procurement activities and your entire tech stack, letting you harness your spending data, stay under budget, and ensure compliance with financial guidelines. 
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: Insights in the form of price benchmarks, negotiation playbooks, and actionable supplier intelligence allow businesses to make informed, strategic decisions. 
• Scalability and Flexibility: Procurement management tools that scale with you, providing strong visibility and management features for both large and small procurement operations. 

How Tropic’s Spend Management Solutions Streamline SaaS Purchasing

Tropic offers an intuitive platform that orchestrates procurement, potentially saving users over 400 hours annually. Unlike complex tools that require extensive training, Tropic prioritizes ease of use. 

• Tropic provides a portal to end users to review the status of their requests, view their contracts, manage renewals and submit new requests.

The answers to a request determine the relevant workflow, which guides users through each step of the purchasing process, ensuring all necessary approvals — legal, financial, and IT — are obtained for every purchase. This systematic orchestration of the procurement process eliminates shadow spending and provides comprehensive tracking data, giving you full control over your SaaS expenditure.

Tropic's user-friendly interface is customizable to align with your specific needs and preferences. The platform's effectiveness is further enhanced by powerful integrations with communication tools like Slack, ERP systems such as NetSuite, and contract management tools like Ironclad. These integrations consolidate information from various business systems, creating a cohesive and efficient spend management ecosystem.

What Our Customers are Saying About Tropic

Tropic's effectiveness is best illustrated through our customers' experiences:

“If you have a lot of cross-functional reviews, Tropic makes it easy to build out workflows…You can take a rightsized approach to procurement.” - Silver Wade, Senior Manager, Procurement

Flatiron Health faced challenges in managing software purchases efficiently, leading to a disjointed process with limited visibility. By implementing Tropic, they streamlined their approval process, reduced request-to-approval time by 50%, and improved cost management. The Tropic platform's dynamic features and adaptability led to enthusiastic adoption and significant improvements in procurement efficiency.

This is just one example of the many happy customers that Tropic has served since our founding in 2019. 

• Matt Weiler, CFO of Daily Harvest, described how Tropic helps his company save 20% on software spend and gain back countless hours. 
• Heather Scheel explained how Broadlume saves $178K+ and 300+ hours annually by using Tropic
• With Tropic saving Zapier 400+ hours a year, Ryan Roccon, VP of Finance called our solution “one of the highest ROI initiatives we’ve ever deployed” 

To hear from the rest of our amazing customers, check out their reviews on G2 and hear from real-world leaders about why Tropic is the best solution for spending management and SaaS purchasing.

Getting Started With Tropic’s Spend Management Software

In addition to an industry-leading procurement orchestration platform, Tropic delivers a comprehensive, seamless, and simple onboarding process that delivers value to you from day one. As soon as your purchase of Tropic is complete, you’ll be assigned a dedicated Implementation Consultant to guide you through every step, ensuring you get the most out of Tropic. Using best practices from working with 500+ customers, Tropic will help you build ideal workflows that work best for your business. Your committed Customer Success Manager helps identify key savings opportunities and partners with you to achieve your spend management  goals.

Our detailed Help Center offers insights to master the Tropic platform, while our team provides subject matter expertise, training, and support as needed.

To experience Tropic's benefits firsthand, simply click "Get Demo" and provide your contact information. A team member will promptly reach out to schedule a personalized walkthrough of the Tropic platform, demonstrating how it can help your business optimize software spend ROI.

We're dedicated to your success from day one, offering a seamless transition to more effective spend management. Let Tropic empower your organization to take control of software expenses and drive strategic growth.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

‍What is spend management software?

Spend management software is a tool that helps businesses manage, optimize, and control their spending on software and other services, streamlining the procurement process and improving cost efficiency.

How does Tropic’s spend management software work?

Tropic’s software integrates with your existing systems to centralize procurement, automate workflows, and provide real-time analytics. It helps you manage vendors, contracts, and expenses more effectively and efficiently.

What is the key differentiator of Tropic’s spend management platform?

Tropic surfaces $10 billion dollars worth of market data and insights on software purchases at the right time in the procurement process, helping teams make informed decisions. 

How can Tropic’s spend management software help reduce costs?

By optimizing procurement processes, improving vendor negotiations, and providing detailed spending insights, Tropic’s software helps businesses identify savings opportunities and reduce overall costs.

Is Tropic’s spend management software suitable for small businesses?

Yes, Tropic’s platform is scalable and flexible, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises to large corporations.

Is Tropic’s spend management software equipped to handle the complex needs of enterprise-level organizations?

Yes, Tropic’s platform is built to support enterprise-level requirements, with advanced features like detailed spend insights, vendor and contract management, and customized workflows. 

Can Tropic’s spend management software integrate with other tools we’re already using?

Yes, Tropic’s software is designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing procurement and financial systems, ensuring a smooth transition and enhanced functionality.

What kind of support does Tropic offer for new users?

Tropic provides comprehensive onboarding, training, and ongoing support to help new users get the most out of their spend management software.

How do I get started with Tropic’s spend management software?

You can start by watching a free 5 minute demo or by requesting a full demo on Tropic’s website. The onboarding process is straightforward, with support available at every step.

What industries benefit most from using spend management software?

Spend management software is beneficial across various industries, including technology, healthcare, finance, and any sector that relies heavily on software procurement and vendor management.

Why should I choose Tropic over other spend management solutions?

Tropic offers a user-friendly, cloud-based platform with powerful features, competitive pricing, and excellent customer support, making it a top choice for businesses looking to optimize their spending.

Maximize ROI With Tropic: The Best Spend Management Software

Organizations collectively lose billions of dollars each year due to poor spending controls, with SaaS spend often being a primary culprit. From the very beginning of the purchasing process, most organizations are left at a disadvantage, lacking the insights necessary to negotiate for fair prices. Reliable research is extremely difficult due to the heavy presence of biased data and paid-for marketing. What’s more, without any kind of automation and guidance for the purchasing process, approvals are easily skipped, leading to blown budgets and shadow spending. 

Tropic is the solution. Our platform makes technology a buyer’s market, automating the procurement process, giving you the analytics you need to eliminate waste, and providing supplier insights so that you can maximize your ROI. Gain end-to-end visibility and eliminate shadow spend, ensuring that each and every purchase goes through the right approvals. Plus, our dedicated subject-matter experts provide all the assistance you need with our assisted purchasing services and high-quality customer support.  

If you’re ready to start taking control of your SaaS spend and maximize your ROI, schedule a full demo and see what Tropic can do for you.

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*Header Image from Christin Hume