Operations
Auditing recurring vendor and subscription spend
Rebuild the inventory of active subscriptions from emails and statements, and surface duplicates, price rises and automatic renewals.
Who it is for
Finance, operations and IT leads in organisations where several people can sign up for tools with a company card.
The scenario
Nobody over-subscribed on purpose. Over three years, different teams simply signed up for tools with the company card: two task managers, three cloud storage plans, licences for people who have since left, and a plan that doubled when somebody opened a second account for a trial.
Recurring spend is the least scrutinised because each line is small. Added up it is a serious budget item, and the only complete trace of what was signed and on what terms lives in signup emails and monthly invoices, scattered across personal inboxes.
When somebody asks how much you spend on software, the honest answer is usually an estimate.
Where it gets stuck today
- The same vendor appears under different names on the statement and on the invoice
- Price rises arrive by email and nobody reviews them
- Annual renewals are charged before there is time to decide
- Licences are still assigned to people who have left
- The real cost per tool means adding up charges across currencies and periods
How Genia Ops helps
- 01
Rebuild the inventory from the real trail
Genia Ops indexes signup emails, invoices and renewal notices and cross-references them with the charges on the statement. The inventory is not declared by hand: it is reconstructed from what has actually been paid.
- 02
Group what is really the same vendor
The agent recognises that a charge, an invoice and a welcome email refer to the same service even when the bank descriptor looks nothing like the commercial name, and folds them into a single line.
- 03
Surface what deserves a decision
Overlap between tools that do the same job, plans with more seats than active users, price rises against the previous period, and renewals falling due in the next ninety days.
- 04
Give you the warning before the charge
With renewal dates and notice periods extracted from the terms, the decision to renew or cancel is taken with room to move instead of when the charge shows up on the statement.
What you end up with
- The inventory of active subscriptions with their annualised cost
- The list of duplicates and unused licences, with the estimated saving
- A renewal calendar including notice periods
- The price history per vendor, so you negotiate with data
Sources in play
- Gmail and Outlook
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Google Calendar
Does this sound familiar?
Tell us how you work today and we will show you how it looks with Genia Ops.