Articles

• Tracking contract renewals with project management software.

  When you forget about a vendor contract renewal date it is a missed opportunity to renegotiate the terms. It is best to track all your contract and software license renewals yourself.

  
  

• Using a calendar to track contract expiration dates.

  It is easy to forget about your vendor contract renewal dates and miss the opportunity to renegotiate the terms or change supplier. The vendors will notify you about upcoming renewals but on a timeline that is advantageous for them rather than you. While many contracts and licenses can be managed perfectly fine this way, it remains better to track all the renewal dates internally.

  
  

• It is dangerous to rely on the AP department for contract renewal notifications.

  Supplier contracts are critical for most businesses. Some come to rely on them to the extent that even a temporary discontinuation can be fatal. Consider having no email for a week due to a lapsed contract.

  
  

• Track your own contract expiry dates.

  In many businesses general staff, rather than the IT department, select and sign up for SaaS tools. The details of the various specialist tools are not relevant to the business at large and payment is generally on a contractless, monthly basis.

  
  

• Sharing passwords safely.

  People frequently need to share account passwords with colleagues. The obvious and easiest way is to use email or internal instant messaging tools but these are both very bad ideas. Both keep data for extended periods which increases the probability that unintended people will discover the passwords.

  
  

• Use a dedicated email account to sign up for web services.

  Keeping track of all the SaaS tools your company uses can get daunting very quickly, even in small companies. Since web services are often built to solve a very specific problem, chances are that most of the services you subscribe to are only used by small, mutually exclusive groups of people. The finance and design departments use different tools and they have no reason to log into each other’s services.

  
  

• What happens when you miss a cloud service subscription payment?

  Missing a cloud service subscription payment can be a big concern for some. The worry is mostly because they don’t know what the repercussions of a missed payment will be, and it is not something one wants to test just to find out. While it is better to never miss payments, the repercussions are not so severe that is should cause anxiety.

  
  

• A spreadsheet to track SaaS license renewals.

  Sometimes one’s job may change so that you suddenly become responsible for keeping track of the company’s recurring software and IT expenses. This often happens to IT managers or admin staff at smaller companies going through expansion, or more traditional businesses increasing their use of SaaS services.

  
  

• A method to save time on collecting invoices.

  Web services normally send their invoices to the account owner, which is usually the person who signed up and who is the one who will use or administer the account. The account owner is most likely not someone from the finance department.

  
  

• Renegotiate the software license periods to free up your time

  Many organisations defer their software license renewal date tracking to a single person or group, often the IT Manager. This can quickly become a mammoth task as the number of subscriptions and licenses balloon, even in small companies, easily taking up most of your working day.