How to Get the Best Savings When You're Growing

By the time most high-growth companies really start to think about controlling costs, it’s already too late. This is because it can be challenging to find the balance, servicing the demands of rapid growth while controlling costs effectively. Navigating this pain point is one of the most difficult components of taking an organization from startup to scaleup.

So, what can you do to ensure you don’t tank your business in the process of growth? Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can drive savings as you grow.

Get All of Your Business Operations off Spreadsheets and onto SaaS Platforms

Time lost on manual processes hurts your bottom line. Don’t accept manual work as necessary. Creating processes that automate tasks and allow staff to spend time on more value-added activities is crucial for a growing startup. Implement SaaS solutions that automate your tasks. Functions you should bring online include invoicing and bookkeeping, payments, hiring talent, and accounts receivable.

Being hobbled by legacy systems and processes is the fastest way to stagnate and guarantee hasty extinction. Rectifying damage done by multiple versions of the same spreadsheet is like being a wayward protagonist in a Chuck Palahniuk novel—no one knows what’s going on until you’re watching a city burn with Marla Singer.

If you asked your staff how much they feel like completing data entry on spreadsheets, hurling corporate art into the wild is probably preferable.

Here are some excellent examples of SaaS applications that can help rapidly growing organizations:

• Payment Solutions: Routable helps businesses scale payment solutions and eliminates time spent on data entry and vendor management. Routable likely syncs with your existing accounting software and also allows for many different payment methods.

• Invoicing and Bookkeeping: Freshbooks allows your team to set up projects, track their time, manage clients, and automatically invoice. It integrates with payment solutions to automatically collect money, making it very easy to manage invoicing and gain visibility into what you are owed.

• Hiring Talent: Anyone that has grown a business can verify that interviewing new talent is an excessive time requirement. Especially if you need to make dozens of new hires a week. SaaS like Vidcruiter can help you automate the first stages of your interview process, test for skills, and learn more about candidates without having to commit hours of your time.

Of course, this isn’t a complete list, but you get the idea—there are tons of SaaS solutions out there that are excessively better than old school spreadsheets. Most of these solutions offer scalable pricing that only charges your organization for the number of seats or use volume. In this way, SaaS tools enable your business rather than draining capital expenses.

Maintain Visibility Into Your SaaS Spend

Controlling SaaS sprawl is crucial to a growing startup. As teams evolve from being relatively small with a lot of overlap to large departments, information becomes siloed. If early employees had access to credit cards, chances are you’re dealing with this issue. It becomes challenging to know which tools are even being used and by whom.

Often, SaaS overlaps to begin with, and SaaS tools also improve so they overlap more over time. At implementation, two tools may share 20 percent functionality. It is common that over a couple of years of SaaS tools existing and evolving, multiple SaaS platforms may do most of the same things as a single competing platform. Constant diligence is required to stay on top of this.

Lengthy rollouts and lack of adoption creates internal hesitancy to explore the proper tools, and feature overlap from previously implemented tools creates wasted time and capital for organizations that don’t have enough of either. On top of the wastage, there could be system bandwidth and compliance issues hidden in siloed tools.

Monitoring all of this plus renewals is a full-time job. Engaging an expert like Tropic will help you identify overlap and wasted money on renewals.

Outsource SaaS Buying

Speaking of SaaS, technology is a critical component in growing a business in 2021. But finding all the best solutions (at the best price) can take months. It is a necessity for finance, procurement, and other departments tasked with managing contracts to drive continuous cost savings. Simply put, it’s not practical to cover 100% of your contract internally.

What if there was a way to hire an expert who specializes in SaaS contracts and purchasing? Someone that could find the perfect tools for your business and negotiate the best deals, based on a robust dataset of thousands of transactions (and inside knowledge), and could handle the renewal process of each tool you add.

This is our specialty at Tropic.

By partnering with us, you can trim five hours of wasted time managing a lengthy negotiation cycle into 5 minutes of clicking to approve.  

Don’t Just Grow Your Business, Grow Your Savings

There are various methods for maximizing growth, but if you’re not careful, it could end up costing you more than it has to. For example, buying software at marked-up prices and/or not choosing the right solutions. You’ll find companies are wasting up to 30% annually on SaaS tools.

But this doesn’t have to be you.

Tropic enables high-growth companies the ability to scale without the hassle and wasted time of dealing with SaaS vendors. Our procurement system analyzes every lever of each negotiation to create win-win scenarios for SaaS buyers and vendors.

Get in touch to find out how we guarantee your SaaS savings—or cut you a check for the difference.