SaaS Renewals & Compliance: Taming the Document Chaos

SaaS is increasingly becoming the default platform for business services - and no wonder, given the cost and efficiency benefits. The problem is that every team and department has a SaaS tool they want to use, and if they’re all signing up for different platforms on different expense lines, it’s very easy to lose track. The result: an ever-extending list of tools, contracts and recurring payments, too many of which silently renew because the reminder emails accumulated in somebody’s inbox.

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It’s not exclusively a work problem. Just wrangling contracts for your personal life is a pricey prospect these days, to the point where there’s an increasing case for an at-home audit - is it worth dropping down to the Netflix with ads in? Is it time to admit that you’re basically paying a cartoon owl protection money for the delusion you’re studying regularly? - but it’s a much bigger problem for businesses.

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With each service coming with its own contract, renewal process and selectively available account manager, staying on top of it all can seem like an overwhelming task. But this is the rare example of where one more purchase can tame all the existing ones - and most likely pay for itself by making it easier to thin the herd. All it takes are six simple steps:

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1. Tally all your current SaaS contracts, and create a central project to track then 
2. Upload all the relevant contracts and agreements to create a secure, accessible record
3. Assign each contract to an appropriate team member, with recurring tasks to review them
4. Create a workflow for all new contracts which enables team members to add them directly to the central project
5. Schedule regular reviews to ensure you’re still getting value
6. Review renewals well in advance

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Read on for more detail on each, and the benefits you can expect to achieve from bringing all your business documents together in one place. 

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1. Create a single registry for all your providers, and stock it with the contracts and renewal information

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The first step towards bringing order is to have a single repository for tracking all your SaaS providers, contracts and documentation. A smart document management system like Workiro is the best foundation for this, going far beyond a simple shared list to a living record of your collective commitments. 

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Using Workiro enables you to create a single source of truth for your business’s SaaS subscriptions. The best approach is to set up a new “Active Subscriptions” project and compile a master list of every subscription - for each, include the service name, monthly/annual cost, renewal date, who the owner is, and the business purpose. 

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2. Create a secure online backup of all the contracts and documentation

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Use Workiro’s unlimited document storage for business to upload all the contracts, renewal notices and existing documents, so you have all the information at your fingertips when it comes to reviewing them.

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This is a significant benefit in itself: you can see at a glance the collected obligations, and instantly find contracts and other key information whenever you need to confirm (or cancel) anything. That’s just the start, though - still more efficiencies await.

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3. Assign ownership and set reminders for renewal and compliance deadlines

The first benefit of using a great document management system for your contract-wrangling is that you can assign ownership to individual team members, with reminders and followups following along, and use the platform to check on progress afterwards. No more surprise renewals or audit failures because key information was buried in somebody’s inbox or lost in a handover: every contract has an owner, and you can see at a glance who.

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For small businesses that might be one or two people, for larger ones responsibility can be spread far and wide. The beauty of using Workiro is that it pairs unlimited user management with robust account control, so you can share tasks with as many people as is necessary. It creates simple, trackable tasks for users, sorted by priority, with automatic central tracking to show progress.

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4. Create a workflow for signing all new contracts

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Once you’ve set up a central repository, you can put it at the heart of your process for signing up for new platforms. You can easily create a new workflow that can handle the entire lifespan of the contract. An employee can submit a request as a new thread or task in Workiro, attaching any relevant documentation (including, inevitably, the explanation for the annual cost increase). 

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The team owner can then be assigned the task of reviewing it - a process which can be quickly and transparently advanced within the platform, by using Workiro's collaboration tools. Real-time chat, comments and PDF markup makes it easy to discuss, amend and approve contracts, and the finished item can be sent back to the supplier for one-click signing. 

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The entire process is captured in Workiro, and tightly integrated into Office365 to make collaboration effortless within the tools your team already use. Once approved, the task can be moved to the "Active Subscriptions" project - ready for ongoing monitoring. Which leads us on to our next point.

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5. Conduct regular, quick reviews to confirm value 

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You’re doubtless doing the reviews already - but using a DMS means that it’s something you can easily schedule and conclude in a few hours, rather than spending an age on evaluation - or worse yet, just confirming what’s being delivered in the first place. 

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In Workiro you can simply set up recurring tasks to remind owners to conduct quarterly reviews of each tool. The contract, document and chat history within each subscription's thread provides a record of past discussions and decisions - making it easy to see the history of a tool's value to the business. With complete transparency and a central document register, you can finish in a morning what could otherwise take a week.

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6. Get ahead of the renewals

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Leaving renewals to the last minute is a recipe for, well, renewal - it’s too easy to miss the deadline and be caught by an auto-renew, or get bogged down in evaluation and opt for continuing “just in case”. Smart SaaS management is reviewing tools and contracts well in advance of the renewal date, and as you’ve probably already realised Workiro makes this easy too. 

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When each SaaS contract begins, use Workiro to set clear deadlines and automated reminders for pre-renewal tasks, with alerts going to the contract owner well in advance of the date - 90, 60 and 30 days are sensible choices, giving ample time to carry out the review. If you’ve followed the previous steps, they will be able to quickly view the contract, the business rationale and any discussion around its use - all within the platform, all at your fingertips.

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Sound tempting? To find out more about how Workiro can bring order to your office and make SaaS management a breeze, set up a call with one of our specialists. If you’d like to hear more about what the best document management systems can offer, check out our other guides. 

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